The U.N. children’s agency says a polio vaccination campaign in Gaza reached 189,000 children, surpassing its target and providing a “rare bright spot” in nearly 11 months of war.
UNICEF said Wednesday that more than 500 teams deployed across central Gaza this week, administering the vaccine to children under 10.
It said Israel and Hamas observed limited pauses in the fighting to facilitate the campaign. U.N. agencies now hope to expand the campaign to the harder-hit north and south of the territory. They hope to vaccinate a total of 640,000 children.
The campaign was launched after Gaza had its first reported polio case in 25 years — a 10-month-old boy, now paralyzed in the leg.
Health experts have warned of disease outbreaks in the territory, where the vast majority of people have been displaced, often multiple times, and where hunger is widespread.
Hundreds of thousands of people are crammed into squalid tent camps with few if any public services.
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Here’s the latest:
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was among six people who were detained in Denmark, police said, after they demonstrated against the University of Copenhagen for cooperating with Israeli universities and shouted pro-Palestinian slogans.
The group was detained Wednesday for suspected trespassing after police said they briefly occupied one of the entrances to the university. They were all later released.
Police evicted the demonstrators after they hung an anti-Israel banner from one of the windows of the university’s old administration building in downtown Copenhagen.
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