On August 29, the U.S. and the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Israel agreed to a three-day “pause” in central Gaza to allow aid agencies to vaccinate children against a potentially deadly and definitely horrific outbreak of polio. That outbreak is the direct product of Israel’s conscious destruction of Gaza’s water, electrical, transportation, and sewage systems. 

At this posting, the actual impact of a pause to allow aid agencies to deliver polio shots, if any, is unknown. Previous “pauses,” that took place early in Israel’s massacre in Gaza, before so much of the infrastructure had been destroyed, before tens of thousands had been killed by Israeli bombs, before thousands and thousands of children had been orphaned, before the hospital system had been so thoroughly destroyed by Israeli bombs, tanks, and snipers… had little if any impact on people’s ability to survive. 

On August 30, two days before the “pause” was to go into effect to allow vaccinations, Israel took credit for an attack, according to the New York Times, where “Israeli forces targeted part of an aid convoy in Gaza, killing four people, according to Anera, an American nonprofit that organized the trucks. The convoy was ferrying food and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in southern Gaza and had coordinated in advance with the Israeli authorities, the nonprofit said in a statement.” The Israeli military justified the murder of aid workers and attack on a convoy headed for a hospital with food and fuel because, they said “armed individuals” had joined one of the vehicles in the convoy. 

In the Israeli-created anarchy and chaos in Gaza, all aid convoys are accompanied by armed security personnel. And so Israel’s “explanation” was essentially a public announcement that all aid convoys are targets for Israeli attack and murder.

Israel’s Genocidal War Created the Conditions for the Deadly Polio Outbreak

One polio victim is 10-month-old Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian. He was partially paralyzed by a mutated strain of the polio virus that was spread through accumulated streams of human waste that people driven from their homes live next to and that children play in.

Abdel-Rahman Abu El-Jedian’s mother, Neveen Abu El Jidyan, told CBS News, "We haven't given him any treatments. We live in a tent and there is no medication." Abdul Rahman had been developing normally and was almost walking, El Jidyan said, when he started throwing up and got a fever.

"I took him to the hospital and they told me there is nothing they can do. They know his condition, but there is no treatment," she told CBS News. "When the virus hit him, he changed in one night." And she blamed the outbreak of polio on "our living conditions—we don't have clean water, clean food. We live in a tent and nothing is clean here."

Neveen Abu El Jidyan and her 10 children, including one infected with polio, were driven from their home in northern Gaza into living in a tent in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. At least 100,000 people have been driven into what Israel calls a “safe zone” that is only 16 square miles—around 11 percent of the total Gaza Strip, the UN said this week. It has no services available to feed people, provide shelter, sanitation, or healthcare. 

The emergence of polio and the danger of an epidemic is a direct result of those conditions. Human waste from people who, before October 7, had received polio vaccine, fills open pits and streams that flow through the hellish death camps like Deir el-Balah, where Palestinians in Gaza have been driven to by Israeli bombs, shells, and destruction. The concentration of polio virus in these streams and piles of human waste is such that children, with no place to go, let alone play, and who end up wading in these streams, are subjected to levels of polio virus sufficient to infect them.