The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, in cooperation with international organizations, launched a compensatory vaccination campaign targeting tens of thousands of children who were deprived of basic vaccines during the war and siege.
According to UN organizations, one in every five Palestinian children has not received basic vaccines, two years after the devastating Israeli war that claimed the lives of more than 20,000 Palestinian children.
The campaign – which is implemented by the Ministry of Health in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and the World Health Organization – aims to vaccinate about 44,000 children against infectious diseases that threaten their lives.
The Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, Dr. Munir Al-Bursh, said that the campaign comes in light of the “health war of extermination” launched by the Israeli occupation army on the Strip, and also aims to conduct malnutrition checks and provide nutritional supplements to the most vulnerable children.
Al-Barsh pointed out – during a humanitarian window broadcast by Al Jazeera – that “the occupation targeted all aspects of life in Gaza, and children were the biggest victim in this war that aimed to erase the Palestinian lineage,” as he put it.
The campaign will start on the ninth of November of this year and will last 10 days, and will be implemented in 3 stages, with a time interval of one month between each stage, after the Ministry of Health has equipped 150 health centers and trained more than 450 health workers to implement the campaign.
According to the Director General of the Ministry of Health, thousands of children under the age of three have not received any vaccination during the past two years, and this makes this campaign “a catch-up opportunity to save a generation threatened by epidemic diseases and slow death.”
Al-Barsh described vaccination as “the first and last line of defense for our children,” and “a survival battle for Palestinian childhood that is being slowly annihilated,” calling on the world to support the right of Gaza’s children to life, health, and safety.
He also called on families to take their children to health centers with vaccination cards – if available – to evaluate their condition and complete their missing doses.
Despite the importance of the campaign, it faces major obstacles, the most prominent of which, according to Al-Bersh, is the lack of medical supplies due to the continued siege and closure of the crossings.
In terms of numbers, there are zero stocks of more than 70% of health supplies, and 60% of basic medicines are missing, in addition to the destruction of dozens of health centers and the difficulty of accessing them as a result of repeated displacement and dispersal of the population, according to the spokesman.
The occupation authorities also did not allow the entry of more than 10% of the sector’s health needs, at a time when the health system lost more than 1,700 medical staff, including martyrs and detainees, and this increased pressure on the staff working in extremely dangerous security conditions.
Al-Barsh accused Israel of obstructing the work of international organizations and depriving hundreds of thousands of children of previous vaccination campaigns, pointing out that “the occupation is still preventing the introduction of vaccines and arresting employees of humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF.”
The ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement ended a genocide that Israel began committing in the besieged Palestinian Strip two years ago, leaving more than 68,000 martyrs and more than 170,000 wounded, and causing destruction that affected about 90% of the civilian infrastructure in the Strip.