RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Palestinian health officials on Friday reported the first case of polio in an unvaccinated 10-month-old child in the Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, the first case in years in the coastal enclave that has been engulfed in the Israel-Hamas war since Oct. 7.
After discovering the child’s symptoms, tests were conducted in Jordan’s capital of Amman and the case was confirmed to be polio, the health officials said.
The potentially fatal, paralyzing disease mostly strikes children under the age of 5 and typically spreads through contaminated water. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where the spread of polio has never been stopped.
The World Health Organization did not immediately respond to requests to confirm the case. However, U.N. health and children’s agencies have called for seven-day pauses in the fighting, starting at the end of August, to vaccinate 640,000 Palestinian children against polio.
They said the polio virus had been discovered in wastewater in two major cities last month in Gaza, which has been polio-free for the last 25 years, according to the United Nations.
The humanitarian community has warned of the re-emergence of polio since the latest war erupted when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing around 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostage. Israel’s devastating retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 people in Gaza in the 10-month-long conflict and created a dire humanitarian situation, which health officials say has created a public health emergency.
In July, WHO said a variant of type 2 was discovered in wastewater samples from southern Khan Younis and central Deir al-Balah, linked to a variant of the polio virus last detected in Egypt last year.
While WHO did not confirm the polio case, it said earlier on Friday that three children in Gaza were found with acute flaccid paralysis — the onset of weakness or paralysis with reduced muscle tone, a common symptom of polio.
The children’s stool samples have been sent for testing to the Jordan National Polio Laboratory, the agency said.
More than 1.6 million doses of the polio vaccine are expected to arrive in Gaza by the end of August, WHO said, in time for the vaccination campaigns which would have to be conducted in two rounds. Children under 10 will be given two drops of the oral vaccine against type 2 of the polio virus.
Health officials in Gaza warned they would not be able to stop the spread of polio and treat people without an urgent cease-fire in place. The stark warning came as international mediators expressed hope that a cease-fire deal is within reach.
Two days of talks had wrapped up in Qatar on Friday, the mediators said, adding that they plan to reconvene in Cairo next week to seal an agreement to stop the fighting.
The mediators have spent months trying to hammer out a three-phase plan in which Hamas would release the hostages in exchange for a lasting cease-fire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.