Ramallah, on the West Bank – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a coronavirus vaccine injection on December 19, kicking off a national outbreak that has made Israel the world’s leading COVID-19 vaccine driver.
But while the Israeli vaccination campaign even includes Jewish settlers living deep inside the illegally owned West Bank, it will exterminate nearly five million Palestinians living under occupation there or in the blocked Gaza Strip.
They have to wait for the Palestinian Authority (PA) with money, which will administer parts of the West Bank under interim peace agreements signed in the 1990s, to deliver the jobs.
The Palestinian health ministry expects the first batch of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to arrive in the West Bank and Gaza in early March, more than two months after Israel’s ouster.
“We have just signed a contract with AstraZeneca to receive two million doses,” May al-Kaila, Palestinian health minister, told Al Jazeera.
The two million doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca would only be enough to protect a million people.
The vaccination is to be free and voluntary. Each dose will cost the PA around $ 5m, making the contract worth around $ 10m.
To date more than 148,100 Palestinians have been positive for coronavirus, and more than 1,610 COVID-19-related deaths have been reported in the West Bank and Gaza since the outbreak began.
But with diseases on the rise, many Palestinians living in the areas they lived in cannot wait until March. New daily infections in the West Bank and Gaza have surpassed 1,000 in the past month. In the second half of December, the number of cases detected per day averaged almost 1,500 – a threefold increase from July 2020.
‘We are a poor country’
The PA also expects to receive vaccines from COVAX – a global collaboration of the World Health Organization, the European Commission and France – which has pledged COVID-19 vaccines to 92 “low-income” countries. and medium ”in response to the pandemic.
“COVAX is going to give us 20 percent of our vaccine requirements in increments,” Yaser Bouzieh, a senior official at the Palestinian health ministry, told Al Jazeera.
COVAX shipments are expected in early March.
While they have money and compete for access with many countries, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said it has also reached out to six vaccine manufacturers: Pfizer, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Sputnik V Russia, Johnson & Johnson, and Sinovac in China.
The health ministry requested the vaccine from the six but received only a response from AstraZeneca. “We are a poor country but we are trying to protect people in every way we can,” al-Kaila said.
Currently, health officials expect to vaccinate around two million Palestinians by May. Frontline and senior staff will be a priority.
According to the Ministry of Health, nearly 40 percent of the Palestinian population is under the age of 18. This large youth demographic should provide some relief to health officials as younger people are significantly more likely to suffer significantly from COVID -19.
But delays in immunizations would mean more deaths as well as more lock-ups and economic pain. The pandemic has largely halted the economy and put pressure on an already vulnerable health system.
Several common and partial locks have been installed in the West Bank and Gaza since March last year.
According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate in Palestine rose to 28.5 percent in the third quarter of 2020, up nearly 4 percent from the same period in 2019.
Even under so much pressure, the pandemic has forced the Palestinian health system to find a way to expand.
Since the outbreak began, five new hospitals have opened in the West Bank. They were slated to open as general hospitals but had to be renamed to care for COVID-19 patients.
The Ministry of Health does not anticipate problems in the distribution of the vaccine, especially with AstraZeneca as it requires only a storage temperature of 2-8 degrees Celsius (35.6-46.4 degrees Fahrenheit).
But there are doubts.
“The scale required to vaccinate people in a critical period of time is enormous,” Dr Robin Abu Ghazaleh, a pathologist at the Palestinian Polytechnic University, told Al Jazeera.
Getting the Pfizer vaccine would speed up vaccinations, but would be a challenge as it needs to be stored at minus 80C (-112F), but the health ministry can only store about 150,000 doses at a time. time.
“We only have two [suitable] freezers in the [West Bank], ”Al-Kaila said.
A Palestinian girl is waiting for her family to enter Egypt through the Rafah Gaza border [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]Challenges of Gaza
Nearly 2,000 new healthcare workers have been trained and employed in the West Bank in the last year. They include lab technicians, doctors, and respiratory specialists, al-Kaila said.
But in Gaza, under Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007, the situation is more dire.
“Every day without the vaccine means more diseases, more hospital admissions, more deaths and higher costs,” Majdi Dheir, a senior health ministry in Gaza, told Al Jazeera .
Deer said in December that 240 patients a day were injured for the ICU. “In January, the numbers are better, they dropped to 135 per day.”
He said Gaza has five freezers suitable for handling the Pfizer vaccine. “My hope is that donor and friendly countries will soon give us the vaccine because it is the lifeline for our people who are tired and under siege,” he said.
“The health infrastructure is under pressure here, the medical teams are under a lot of pressure.”
Deir said Israel has a duty to help the accused circulate. “Israel has a responsibility to give us the vaccine, they are the power of residence.”
The vaccines first arrive at Israeli airports before being transferred to the Palestinian territories, resulting in a very possible delay.
Ghassan Nimer, the spokesman for PA’s interior ministry, told Al Jazeera: “We always expect problems from the Israeli side. It is possible, of course, that they have control over the borders. “
Israel ‘avoids its obligations’
Israel began rolling out the Pfizer vaccine on December 23 and in less than three weeks managed to vaccinate more than 1.5 million citizens, including settlers in the West Bank. Residents of East Palestine Jerusalem are also eligible for the vaccine.
Netanyahu recently said that Israel planned to give all its citizens older than 16 by the end of March the vaccine. “We are the first country in the world to come out of the coronavirus,” he said.
But the coordinator of the Israeli government’s actions in the Palestinian territories, COGAT, told Al Jazeera that fighting COVID-19 in the West Bank and getting vaccinated is PA’s responsibility under Oslo Accords.
COGAT also said Israel had allowed the import of medical equipment into the West Bank donated by the international community, including “thousands of test kits, protective items, foreign faces” , and even coordinating “joint training for Israeli and Palestinian medical teams”.
“It is important to note that Israel has not rejected any request for medical assistance that has reached its doorstep.”
Israeli public security minister Amir Ohana has ordered the Israeli prison service not to vaccinate Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons.
According to prison rights group Addameer, there are 4,400 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, including 160 child prisoners, 440 in administrative detention, and 37 female prisoners.
The argument that the Oslo Accords exempt Israel from providing medical care to Palestinians is wrong, according to some human rights advocates.
“Sixty percent of the West Bank is under full Israeli control,” Francesca Albanese, an international lawyer and author, told Al Jazeera.
“Israel has a duty to protect the Palestinian people from the virus, which means planning to vaccinate the Palestinians without discrimination,” she said.
Amnesty International called on Israel to “stop evading its responsibilities as a proprietary power”.
“Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination program highlights the institutional discrimination that outlines the Israeli government’s policy toward Palestine,” the rights group said in a statement.