For a few quiet weeks, health workers in Gaza have been racing against time and against the memory of years of war to protect the youngest children while a fragile ceasefire holds.
Since November 9, teams from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNRWA and Gaza’s Health Ministry have been going house to house and running clinics to vaccinate children under three against a long list of diseases: measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, hepatitis B, tuberculosis, polio, rotavirus and pneumonia. By Thursday, WHO chief Dr Tedros said more than 10,000 youngsters had already been jabbed. The campaign’s target is 40,000, and two more rounds are planned in December and January.
For doctors and parents here, the pause in fighting is a rare chance to catch up on basic health work after the health system was devastated. “The ceasefire gives us space to re-equip clinics and run services we simply couldn’t before,” Dr Tedros wrote on X, noting how the lull has allowed humanitarian teams to scale up life-saving care.
But the calm has been brittle. Hours after the WHO update, Israeli strikes hit parts of Gaza, killing 27 people in attacks the enclave’s civil defence said were among the deadliest since the truce began on October 10. Gaza authorities said 14 died in Gaza City and 13 in Khan Younis. Israel said its strikes were a response to fire toward its troops; Hamas denied the claim and called Israel’s response an escalation.
The ceasefire has not ended all violence: aid agencies say more than 280 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since the truce took effect, with many of those deaths concentrated in a single, deadly day of strikes last month after clashes that killed three Israeli soldiers.
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On the diplomatic front, the UN Security Council this week backed a U.S.-led peace plan that would create a temporary Board of Peace to manage Gaza and authorize an international stabilization force a setup that the resolution says could run through 2027. A U.S.-staffed Civil-Military Co-ordination Centre, with about 200 personnel, has been set up in southern Israel to help oversee the truce and the flow of aid and movement.
For now, vaccinators, nurses and volunteers are pressing on, trying to use the breathing space to protect children who have gone months without routine care. If the next phases go ahead as planned, thousands more young lives in Gaza battered by war, shortages and disease will have a better shot at staying healthy. But as recent strikes show, that hope depends on keeping the fragile ceasefire from snapping.
