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Starting Sunday, the Israeli military and Hamas will observe brief, staggered pauses in fighting to allow 640,000 Gazan children to be vaccinated, U.N. officials said.
Aug. 30, 2024Updated 6:00 p.m. ET
War and disease have been cruelly intertwined for as long as humans have confronted one another on the battlefield, and in the Gaza Strip, polio is now stalking a population that for nearly 11 months has been on the run from relentless bombardment.
Under ratcheting international pressure to prevent an outbreak of the crippling disease, Israel, which has rebuffed much of the criticism of its handling of the war, is moving with relative haste. Israeli officials agreed this week to temporary and localized pauses in fighting to allow United Nations aid workers to deliver vaccines to 640,000 children.
In a conflict where the warring sides have agreed on precious little, Hamas says it will also abide by the staggered pauses in fighting, which are scheduled to begin on Sunday.
But health officials warn the plan comes with enormous challenges. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure is in ruins, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living in temporary shelters and aid workers have been attacked while trying to deliver supplies.
Those risks were underlined on Thursday when Israeli forces targeted part of an aid convoy in Gaza, killing four people, according to Anera, an American nonprofit that organized the trucks. The convoy was ferrying food and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in southern Gaza and had coordinated in advance with the Israeli authorities, the nonprofit said in a statement.
The Israeli military said “armed individuals” had joined one of the vehicles in the convoy and that it had carried out a strike targeting them.
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