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SvennoJ on 19 February 2025
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UN to continue mass polio vaccination campaign in Gaza

  • WHO and UNICEF are preparing to administer vaccines to more than 591,000 children younger than 10 in Gaza.
  • The campaign will take place from February 22-26.
  • It comes after a survey by the WHO found that 88 percent of environmental samples taken from across Gaza were contaminated with the poliovirus.
  • “The current environment in Gaza, including overcrowding in shelters and severely damaged water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure, which facilitates fecal-oral transmission, creates ideal conditions for further spread of poliovirus,” the groups said.
  • Two previous vaccination rounds, conducted in September and October, reached more than 95 percent of the target, but the presence of the virus requires additional efforts to reach every child and strengthen population immunity, the groups said.



Israel reveals whereabouts of 64 detainees from Gaza

Israeli authorities have informed the Commission of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoner’s Society of the whereabouts of 64 Palestinians from Gaza after months of enforced disappearance.

In a statement, the groups named the 64 people and said they are being held in Negev and Nafha prisons, the Sde Teiman and Saharonim detention facilities, Ofer Prison, Nitzan Prison and Naftali and Megiddo prisons. But they said they are yet to receive any information about the fate of hundreds of others taken from Gaza.

“We note that the only available information about the number of detainees from Gaza is what the prison administration acknowledged at the beginning of this February, which amounts to 1,802 of those classified as illegal combatants. The number includes women and children, while hundreds more are still subject to the crime of enforced disappearance,” the groups said.

“It is worth noting that the number of arrests from Gaza is estimated in the thousands since the beginning of the war of extermination, and the occupation continues to carry out systematic torture crimes against Gaza detainees at an unprecedented level that has led to the martyrdom of dozens of them.”


Israel has withheld bodies of Palestinians for decades

A group that advocates the return of the remains of Palestinians held by Israel says that authorities in the country are withholding the bodies of at least 665 people, according to Al Jazeera Arabic.

They include those of Palestinians killed in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Palestinians killed last week in the ongoing fighting in the occupied West Bank, the National Campaign to Retrieve Martyrs’ Bodies says.

Some have been buried in cemeteries while others are being held in refrigerators, the group added.

The number does not include the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Gaza, which is unknown, the group said.