U.N. calls Israeli evacuation orders in Gaza “complete disaster” for humanitarian work as polio vaccinations set to begin

As the United Nations prepared to begin a polio vaccination campaign in the Gaza Strip Tuesday, a U.N. humanitarian worker there said multiple evacuation orders by the Israeli military have been “completely disruptive to the humanitarian response on the ground.”

“If the humanitarians are having to move themselves, they’re not able to work. Operations have to halt while they relocate,” Louise Wateridge told CBS News partner network BBC News.

She said UNRWA, the U.N. agency that works in the Palestinian territories and is the largest primary health care provider in the Gaza Strip, had been ordered to evacuate its facilities at least 15 times in August so far — amounting to around once every two days.

“There’s health centers, there’s schools where people are sheltering from, there’s headquarter buildings, there’s distribution centers. All of these buildings that we’re working from, we have to move everything out of, move personnel, move aid, move any operations that are ongoing, patients and so on,” Wateridge said. “Lives are being lost, people are not receiving aid. It’s just a complete disaster for us trying to do our jobs on the ground.”

The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday that troops “continued to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, eliminate terrorists, and locate underground terrorist infrastructure and weapons” in operations in central Gaza. The IDF has long accused Hamas of keeping weapons and militants, even having command centers, in schools, hospitals and other civilian infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the population of Gaza has been forced to move to an ever-shrinking humanitarian zone designated by Israel’s military. The latest evacuation orders from the Israelis have reduced that coastal patch of ground to around 11% of the size of the Gaza Strip, the U.N. said. 

Several hundred thousand already-displaced people have recently been ordered to pack into the area, “and this isn’t 11% of land that is fit for habitation, fit for services, fit for life, really,” Sam Rose, the senior deputy field director for UNRWA, told reporters Monday, adding that in the cramped conditions, polio has re-emerged “with a small number of cases that could spread very rapidly.”

Polio is a disease that mainly affects young children and can lead to lifelong paralysis. The first case of polio in Gaza in 25 years was confirmed last week in a 10-month-old child, according to UNICEF, the U.N.’s children’s agency. The child reportedly became paralyzed in one leg and is in a stable condition.

A U.N. campaign to vaccinate around 95% of children in Gaza under the age of 10 was scheduled to begin on Saturday, a U.N. official said Monday as the fist batch of vaccines arrived in the enclave.

“We’re about to do the impossible and start this polio vaccination campaign under these conditions,” Wateridge told the BBC. “But it’s just almost impossible in these circumstances with this bombing, with these strikes, with these continued displacement orders to try and reach these children and give out this healthcare that they need.”

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas and other militants launching the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking around 250 others into Gaza as hostages. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians. It has caused a widescale humanitarian crisis and forced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents to flee their homes.