Israel excluding Palestinians colonies from COVID-19 vaccine programme: Report

While Israel’s inoculation programme is powering ahead, the drive is excluding Palestinians residing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza as the vaccines are only given to Jewish settlers there. According to The Guardian, Israel transports batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine deep inside the West Bank, but they are not being distributed to the roughly 2.7 million Palestinians living in the region. The Palestinian Authority, which maintains limited self-rule in the territories, has said that optimistically, the shots could arrive within the next two weeks. 

The director-general of the Palestinian health ministry has estimated that the first vaccines would probably arrive in February. And those would be through a WHO-led partnership called COVAX, which has pledged to vaccinate 20 per cent of Palestinians. However, as the COVAX vaccines have not yet gained “emergency use”, Gerald Rockenschaub, the head of the office at WHO Jerusalem, said it could be “early to mid-2021” before the vaccine was available for distribution in the Palestinian territories. 

Israel, on the other hand, has vaccinated more than 950,000 residences since mass inoculation began earlier on December 20. The latest count implies that the country, which houses nearly 9.3 million people, has vaccinated over 10.3 percent of its total population. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has even told Israeli’s that the country could be the first to emerge from the pandemic. 

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Israel accused of dodging legal obligations 

Even with Israel’s record-setting vaccination drive, the Palestinian authorities have not officially asked for help. The Israeli officials have suggested that they might provide surplus vaccines to Palestinians and claimed they are not responsible for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Meanwhile, international rights groups have accused Israel of dodging moral, humanitarian, and legal obligations as an occupying power during the pandemic. 

Due to the disparities between the two regions, while Israel could return to some form of normalcy within three months, Palestinians, on the other hand, could remain trapped by the virus. In Gaza, which is an impoverished enclave under an Israeli blockade, the timeframe is believed to be even longer than in the West Bank. According to reports, the strip’s Islamist rulers have been unable to contain the virus and are enemies with Israel and political rivals with the Palestinian Authority. 

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