Updated: The World Health Organization confirmed Tuesday evening that it had evacuated 85 severely ill and wounded Gazans to the United Arab Emirates for advanced treatment via Israel’s Ramon airfield. 

The complex operation occurred as tensions escalated in the region following the deaths of 12 children in a Golan Heights Druze community –  apparently from a missile fired by the Lebanese Shi’ite Hizbullah. 

The carefully planned evacuation had originally been scheduled to take place on Monday, WHO confirmed. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly had delayed the plan after a missile hit on the soccer field of Majdal Shams, a mountain tourist town near the Lebanese border, early Saturday evening, killing a dozen children aged 10-16. Hizbullah denied responsibility for the attack, but western experts and intelligence sources said that evidence points to a rocket from Lebanon. 

Tuesday’s evacuation of some 35 children and 50 adults, along with 63 family members and care-givers, finally took place under a shroud of secrecy, and on a day when tensions between Israel and Hizbullah soared to new heights as Hizbullah fired over 50 more missiles into northern Israel, killing one more person.

In the early evening, Israel’s response for the Majdal Shams attack finally came in the form of a retaliatory strike on a Beirut apartment building, targeting a senior Hizbullah military commander in an area near the milita’s headquarters, and causing dozens of casualties, according to Lebanese reports. 

Hizbullah has been fighting alongside Gaza’s Hamas ever since the deadly 7 October attacks that triggered the current war.  The Druze, meanwhile, are members of an ancient religious minority whose communities dot the border regions of pre-1967 Israel and the Golan Heights, not to mention Lebanon and Syria – implicating them in the wider Israeli-Arab conflict on multiple fronts.

Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights, is considered occupied Syrian territory by the United Nations, but it was annexed by Israel in 1981, becoming a popular Israeli tourist destination with rich natural resources and archeological history. Since the eruption of the Syrian civil war over a decade ago, an increasing number of Golan Druze, who already had Israeli residency, have also taken on citizenship. 

‘We hope this paves the way for evacuation corridors via all possible routes’

Reports of a plan to begin airlifting hundreds of seriously ill and wounded children out of Gaza to the UAE via Israel’s Ramon airfield in the Negev desert first surfaced in media reports last week, despite WHO’s efforts to keep the mission under tight wraps. 

The airlift scheme came against a background of mounting international criticism of Israel’s seizure of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in early May. That effectively sealed off the only available route for medical evacuees, as well as for Gazans who could afford the hefty visa fees to escape the war. 

“The patients had cancer, injuries, blood diseases, congenital conditions, neurological conditions, cardiac and liver and renal disease,” said WHO’s Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in an X post, Tuesday evening.

“We hope this paves the way for the establishment of evacuation corridors via all possible routes,” he added.

The WHO team organized and managed the transfer of patients from over half a dozen areas in Gaza to Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing under “extremely challenging conditions” the organization said, including active conflict in various parts of Gaza. After the original mission was postponed Sunday, some injured and ill patients had to be held at a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) field hospital site, pending Tuesday’s final evacuation.

Speaking at a UN press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said that some 10,000 people, in all, were in need of medical evacuation – as continued waves of conflict-related displacement, malnutrition and interruptions in medical services continue to haunt Gaza’s 2 million Palestinian residents.  

Since October 2023, around 5000 people have been evacuated for treatment outside Gaza during the grinding nine months of war, with over 80% receiving care in Egypt, Qatar and the UAE.

Many Gazans new rounds of displacement as WHO dispatches 1 million polio vaccines

Lindmeier also echoed recent calls by regional health ministers for a cease fire and an ‘enabling environment’ so that a massive polio vaccination campaign could safely take place in the coming days and weeks.

“Otherwise, the vaccines would be sitting as many other trucks are across the border, either on the Rafah side or at the other checkpoints either inside…or outside Gaza,” Lindmeier said.

WHO last Friday said that it was dispatching 1 million polio vaccines to Gaza after evidence of vaccine derived polio virus was found in local sewage sources. 

No actual cases of polio, which can lead to paralysis and even death, have been reported so far in Gaza. But since the beginning of the war on 7 October, 2023, polio immunization rates have dropped by about 10%, WHO and other global health authorities have observed. And that increases the risk that under-vaccinated Gaza children and adults, who are also suffering from a lack of clean water access and widespread malnourishment, could fall ill. 

“Having vaccine-derived polio virus in the sewage very likely means that it’s out there somewhere in people,” Lindmeier said. “So the risk of (it)… spreading further is there and it would be a setback definitely (for global efforts).”

This is not the first time, either, that polio has circulated in sewage in the densely-populated region. In 2022, Israel conducted its own emergency polio vaccination campaign amongst under-vaccinated groups after a 4-year old Jerusalem child fell ill while six others were diagnosed with asymptomatic cases, and the virus was identified in sewage samples, as well. 

Mounting water, sewage and sanitation crisis 

Along with that, there is a mounting water, sewage and sanitation crisis in Gaza – exacerbated by the recent Israeli army explosion of a large water reservoir in Rafah. 

Also speaking at the Tuesday UN briefing, James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), denounced the blowing up of the Rafah water facility last week at Tel  Sultan – calling it an act of  “blatant disregard” for children’s rights. 

The range of water availability in Gaza is currently 2-9 litres per person per day, he pointed out – whereas the humanitarian minimum standard is 15 liters – and that is notwithstanding the sweltering temperatures Gazans are currently facing at the peak of summer – with daytime temperatures averaging highs of 36°.

Israel’s military has not commented publicly on the incident. But military police are  reportedly probing the incident as a suspected violation of international law, which may have also been sanctioned by a local commander, Israeli media reported. 

The incident provoked expressions of outrage within Israel, as well as internationally, after a soldier who participated in the demolition of the reservoir, known as Canada well, posted a video on Instagram, and later on X, celebrating the explosion with a caption stating it was “in honor of the Sabbath” – the Jewish day of rest.   

The reservoir and solar-powered water treatment facility, was developed by Canada’s International Development Agency in the 1990s and supplies a large proportion of the city’s water needs.

Some 20,000 Palestinians remain in the Rafah area, including in the Tel Sultan area, which had not been subject to forced evacuation.  Around 1.4 million displaced Palestinians had been sheltering there before Israelis forces moved into the southern border city in May.

“Somehow people are holding on, but of course we are now in that deathly cycle whereby children are very malnourished, there is immense heat, there is lack of water, there’s a horrendous lack of sanitation and that’s the cycle,” Elder observed. “On top of that, of course, there is a very, very active conflict.”

Image Credits: X/@Dr Tedros, WHO, Global Polio Eradication Initiative, X/Times of Israel.