World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the vaccines will be administered to children in the coming weeks.

He noted that no cases of polio have been recorded yet but without immediate action, it was “just a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected”.

Humanitarians have expressed deep concerns about the impact of a possible polio emergency in Gaza, amid disastrous sanitary conditions marked by outbreaks of hepatitis A and myriad other preventable diseases, along with a lack of access to healthcare, because of the war.