by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
Information about covid vaccination programmes in Gaza is scant. The World Health Organisation (“WHO”) doesn’t provide clear data and available information often combines Gaza and the West Bank as “Palestine.” In short, details of the aid being sent to Gaza is shrouded in mystery.
Before 7 October 2023, covid vaccination rates in Gaza were low; initially 5% and at the last count up to 40% of the population had been vaccinated while WHO said that at least 60%-70% of the population must be vaccinated.
From the scant information available, it is clear there has been a concerted effort, particularly by WHO, to push for covid vaccinations in Gaza, despite the population being vaccine-hesitant.
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Following WHO’s covid vaccine drive, there was a polio vaccine drive. The vaccines used are novel oral polio vaccine type 2 (nOPV2), which was developed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to combat the polio emergency created by the previous oral polio vaccine.
Since the war began on 7 October 2023, an estimated 5,800,000 vaccine doses have been delivered into Gaza which has a population of around two million. Of the total, it is said about 4,800,000 doses are polio vaccines. By mid-October 2024, 95% of Gaza’s children under the age of 10 had been vaccinated at least twice in that year.
Polio was eradicated from Gaza 25 years ago. WHO’s massive polio vaccination campaign was justified by one polio case in Gaza in July 2024.
Table of Contents
Who Runs Gaza?
The UN is the de facto government in Gaza. In a 2023 article published by the Gatestone Institute, Bassam Tawil, a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East, wrote that in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, UNRWA has, in fact, long been operating as the de facto government.
Also in 2023, in explaining why no cement could be spared from terror tunnels to build bomb shelters for Gazan citizens, a Senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk said, “The tunnels were built to protect the fighters of Hamas from [Israeli] airstrikes. As you know, 75% of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees. It is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect the refugees.”
Marzouk was effectively saying that Hamas are responsible for what happens underground, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (“UNRWA”) is responsible for what happens above ground.
Further reading:
- The Gaza Ministry of Health casualty numbers are not real; here’s the evidence
- George Soros, the United Nations and groups organising pro-Hamas protests
WHO’s Covid Vaccination Programme in Gaza
Information about vaccination programmes in the Gaza Strip is not readily available. This is partly because records from WHO are not made public and partly because the fashion is to report on the West Bank and Gaza combined. As with all things WHO-related, the lack of transparency leaves one feeling there is something “they” are attempting to hide – and there often is.
To demonstrate our point: Our World in Data’s (“OWD’s”) information relating to covid vaccinations for Gaza is included under “Palestine.” The data is collated from WHO’s records. OWD last updated its data for Palestine on 14 August 2024 but no data is available from WHO after 18 October 2022, almost two years before.
WHO does not define what it means by “Palestine.” There is no international consensus on where the borders of Palestine are. For Islamists, such as Hamas, Palestine “extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean [Sea] in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south,” a land area that includes the entirety of Israel and extends into Lebanon. To others, Palestine does not exist. Many, as is seemingly becoming normalised with the help of campaigns being run by the UN and corporate media, appear to use “Palestine” as a term to describe the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. We’ll assume, rightly or wrongly, that this last definition is the one WHO uses to compile its data.
As data from “official” sources for Gaza, specifically, is absent, we are left to scrabble for information from news reports and social media posts, which also employ similar murky tactics to give away as little information as possible. We can suspect that the lack of Gaza-specific information is because WHO – a specialised agency of the United Nations, as is UNRWA – is controlling what information the public is permitted to see and how they are permitted to see it to avoid public scrutiny. In this regard, WHO has form.
Before 7 October 2023
On 9 January 2021, the Minister for Health for the West Bank said that sufficient covid “vaccines” were expected to arrive in the first quarter of 2021 to “cover 70 per cent of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, while the World Health Organisation will provide vaccines for 20 per cent of the population.”
On 22 February 2021, the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip began its coronavirus vaccination drive following the arrival of the first 22,000 doses of covid injections. Former health ministers and several medical workers were inoculated with Russia’s Sputnik V injections. More medical workers and patients with chronic diseases were to start receiving injections the next day.
By this time, roughly one-third of Israel’s 9.3 million people had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech injection, drawing widespread condemnation for Israel for not making sure Palestinians had been injected with the injurious and deadly covid “vaccines” in the same proportion as Israelis.
Writing for Doctors Without Borders, a registered nurse who was working in the West Bank, Matthias Kennes, wrote, “As a medic, I am shocked. The internationally acclaimed covid-19 vaccination success of Israel has a dark side. The consequences of which are being felt cruelly in the West Bank … and the blockaded Gaza Strip … you are over 60 times more likely to have a vaccination in Israel than in Palestine … I am outraged, but my colleagues in Gaza are even more so.”
Criminally, the UN was also exerting pressure on Israel to inject Palestinians:
UN officials and human rights groups have voiced concerns over the disparities and said that Israel, as an occupying power, has an obligation to help the Palestinians. Israel says that under interim peace accords, the internationally recognised Palestinian Authority is responsible. Israel has vaccinated its own Arab population.
The Palestinian Authority has struggled to secure vaccines, obtaining just 2,000 doses from Israel for West Bank medical workers and an additional 10,000 doses from Russia. Last week, it transferred 2,000 of the Russian vaccines to Gaza. On Sunday, a rival of [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas organised a shipment of 20,000 Russian vaccines to Gaza from the United Arab Emirates in a move apparently aimed at embarrassing the Palestinian leader ahead of elections in May. [Emphasis added.]
Hamas-ruled Gaza launches coronavirus vaccination drive, AP News, 22 February 2021
On 17 March 2021, “Palestine” received the first shipment of 37,440 doses of Pfizer’s covid “vaccine” and 24,000 doses of the AstraZeneca covid injections from the COVAX Facility as part of the first wave allocation. These vaccine doses were transferred to the Ministry of Health’s ultra-cold chain and vaccine storage facilities in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This shipment as well as the next were intended for both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, according to the prioritisation criteria of the national deployment and vaccination plan.
Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, acting WHO Head of Office for West Bank and Gaza said when the first batch was delivered: “WHO welcomes the opportunity to be able to help Palestinians fight the coronavirus with this important delivery of vaccines aimed initially at frontline health care workers.”
In July 2021, Al Jazeera reported that Gazans, in particular, did not want to be injected: “More than five months since the arrival of the first batch of covid-19 jabs in the Gaza Strip, the vaccine rollout … has been met with general distrust and, in many cases, outright refusal.” The news outlet said that 98,000 people – or just less than 5% of the population in Gaza – had taken up a covid injection.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported that by 12 August 2021, only 113,863 (5.4%) citizens in the Gaza Strip had been vaccinated.
In October 2021, The Times of Israel reported:
When the restrictions were announced at the end of August, just 34.2 per cent of eligible West Bankers had been vaccinated. The number now stands at over 60% in the West Bank, according to health officials.
The Gaza Strip still has lower rates of vaccination than the West Bank. Only about 37% of Palestinians eligible for the vaccine – around one-quarter of the total population – has received a dose, according to health officials.
A cross-sectional study conducted in the Gaza Strip in October 2021 showed a lower uptake than The Times of Israel. The study found that only 28.44% of the respondents had received the injection, while 71.56% had not received the “vaccine” or did not know about it. However, not all studies agreed with this study’s relatively low uptake.
Another study published almost a year later, on 9 September 2022, estimated half of Gaza’s adult population had received at least one dose of any covid-19 vaccine by October 2021, and the majority of unvaccinated people were hesitant. “Disparities in vaccination across the [Palestinian] territory’s demographic groups underscore the need for targeted outreach to these populations and messaging through community-based channels to permeate social networks of the unvaccinated,” the study said. For those of us who know what has happened during the covid era, this sounds like a suggestion to “turn up the PsyOp dial.”
Vaccine hesitancy among Palestinians must have been causing the pandemic-vaccine industrial complex headaches because another study published six months earlier explored how vaccine-hesitant Palestinians could be persuaded to roll up their sleeves and enter the vaccine lottery of life, injury or death.
