JERUSALEM: The Zionist military said on Sunday it will start offering the polio vaccine to soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip after remnants of the contagious polio virus were found in test samples in areas of the coastal enclave.

Soldiers will be vaccinated during routine troop turnover, though it is not mandatory, the military said. There are about 170,000 full-time soldiers and another 300,000 reservists in the Zionist army.

UN agencies said last week that the Global Polio Laboratory Network found type-2 poliovirus in six environmental samples collected on June 23. The Zionist entity’s health ministry said it had made similar findings. No human cases have been reported.

Much of Gaza’s health infrastructure has been destroyed during the Zionist entity’s nine-month military offensive on the territory. Public health officials and aid groups have warned that without proper health services the population is particularly vulnerable to disease outbreaks.

The highly contagious virus is caught by drinking contaminated water or through oral contact. It can cause paralysis and in extreme cases death. Waste water now runs in between tents in many camps for the displaced and fresh water is increasingly scarce. With fuel limited, aid agencies rarely send out trucks with water and pumps at wells cannot be used. Many people walk long distances to get safe water from points set up by volunteers.

‘Always ill’

Northern Gaza is suffering particularly badly from food and water shortages after major Zionist offensives. Ahmed Al-Shanbari, a father living in a camp in Jabalia said the water his family has “is not suitable for drinking or cooking.” “My children suffer from kidney disease, jaundice, itching and coughing. There is no treatment in northern Gaza,” he said. Shanbari said the family spends four hours each day searching for a source of water.

In Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, Umm Nahed Abu Shar is already living a health nightmare in her family’s tent. City authorities said last week that waste water treatment stations had been turned off due to a lack of fuel. “The heat, the diseases, the flies, the mosquitoes and their hissing, it all hurts us,” the 45-year-old mother told AFP. “We don’t sleep at night because of the smell of sewage. My children do not sleep because they are always ill with something spread by the waste.”

On top of hunger that UN agencies say has gripped Gaza since the Zionist offensive, doctors say scabies, chicken pox, skin rashes and lice are spreading fast. UN agencies have repeatedly warned of the risk of cholera and other more serious diseases becoming epidemics.

No access to landfills

Umm Yussef Abu al-Qumsan, 60, has also had to leave her home and move to Deir el-Balah where she said it was “a miserable life among rubbish and insects”. Nearly every day she accompanies her children or grandchildren to queue for a nurse to help for diseases or mosquito bites.

“We buy many treatments. But we don’t know if it is safe to eat or drink. Whether we can sit or sleep,” she said. Deir el-Balah city authorities last week predicted that “roads will be flooded by wastewater” and “diseases will spread” after it turned off sewage water pumping and treatment stations. It said 700,000 people who have descended on the city in search of safety from fighting and air strikes are at risk.

A fire has burned on one dump at Al-Mawasi, a giant tent city near Khan Yunis in the south, for the past week, according to 35-year-old Muhammad Al-Kahlot. The under-equipped emergency services have been unable to stop it.

The Zionist entity has bombed Al-Mawasi several times and Kahlot said the waste is an added threat. “We are suffocating from the foul smell of waste, the smoke and the heat,” he said.

Pax, a Dutch activist group, said in a new study that “months of continuous bombing and the entity’s fuel blockade have decimated” Gaza’s outdated waste collection system. “Local authorities report that the (IDF) are preventing access to Gaza’s three official landfills.”

Pax said it has studied satellite imagery showing 225 growing waste dumps across Gaza. The group said a “chemical soup” of matter and heavy metals could contaminate water supplies and farmland and “eventually toxic substances penetrate the food chain and find their way back to humans”.

Pax warned that as water can “migrate over long distances” the danger could spread beyond the war zone. “While the danger for Gaza is imminent, the overall region could soon confront grave ecosystem and public health problems.” — Agencies