JERUSALEM – Israel quickly became the world leader in vaccinating its population against Covid-19, but almost all Palestinian residents in the occupied West Bank are still waiting for their first doses of the vaccine.
This disparity has sparked a turbulent debate over Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power in one of the world’s longest-running territorial disputes.
For Israel’s critics, international law obliges Israel to give Palestinians access to vaccines comparable to what it offers its own citizens. But advocates for Israel’s policies say the Palestinians took responsibility for the health services of their people when they signed the Oslo Accords in the 1990s.
Although the Palestinians’ stark vulnerability to the virus has lessened somewhat this week – the Palestinian Authority has officially launched a vaccination campaign giving frontline health workers doses received from Israel – the contrast with Israel remains stark. The disparity also partly reflects the wide inequality in access to vaccines between rich countries like Israel and other areas of the developing world.
The Palestinian vaccination campaign is still far behind Israel, which with a population of about 9.2 million has already inoculated more than 3.3 million people with the first dose. They include a substantial percentage of the approximately 450,000 settlers who live alongside Palestinians in the West Bank, who number between 2.5 million and three million.
It is unclear precisely when the estimated two million Palestinians in Gaza, the blocked enclave controlled by the anti-Israel militant group Hamas, will begin receiving vaccines.
For the small number of Palestinian doctors and nurses who received vaccines on Wednesday, it was a time of relief.
“Praise be to God, I feel great,” said Ayman Abu Daoud, 49, a nurse from Bethlehem who has administered coronavirus tests for the past 11 months. “Vaccines are giving us hope of overcoming the pandemic, but we still have a long way to go.”
Abu Daoud was one of 100 frontline medical workers in the Belém region – where the first Palestinian cases in the West Bank were discovered – receiving vaccines on Wednesday and Thursday, local health officials said. Dozens of other frontline health workers in the Belém area were still waiting for injections, they said.
Bassil Bawatneh, the director of an eye hospital near Ramallah that has been turned into a coronavirus treatment center, called vaccinating medical staff “a very important step”.
Palestinians received their first substantial shipment of vaccines last Monday, when Israel gave the Palestinian Authority 2,000 doses of Moderna – a move the Israeli government approved after public health experts recommended it. Israeli officials said they plan to deliver 3,000 additional doses.
On Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health said the vaccination campaign would initially target frontline health professionals and then expand to people over 60, as well as those suffering from chronic illnesses.
Palestinians received 10,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine on Thursday. They expect to receive 37,440 doses of Pfizer in February and hundreds of thousands of doses of AstraZeneca in late February or early March through the Covax global sharing initiative, according to Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the World Health Organization mission to Palestinians. Another two million doses of AstraZeneca are expected to arrive in March, Palestinian officials said.
Palestinian Authority Health Minister Mai al-Kaila said vaccines would be transferred to Gaza on Wednesday, but Israeli security officials said the Palestinians had not submitted a formal request for permission to send vaccines there. Any request would require approval from the Israeli government, officials said.
The launch of the vaccination campaign in the West Bank followed a sharp disagreement between Israeli and Palestinian supporters over whether Israel has a responsibility to vaccinate Palestinians.
Human rights defenders have argued that Israel is required, under international law, to provide Palestinians with access to vaccines on par with what it makes available to its own citizens. Some also argue that Israel has a moral imperative to do so as a military occupier with the means to help.
The defenders pointed to the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that the occupying powers have a duty to guarantee the public health of people living under occupation “to the fullest extent” possible, especially with regard to combating epidemics and diseases.
“After 50 years of occupation with no end in sight, Israel’s duties go beyond offering spare doses,” said Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch director for Israel and Palestine, referring to the vaccine vials that Israel delivered to the Palestinians in Monday.
Shakir emphasized that Israel should provide vaccines to Palestinians, regardless of the Palestinian Authority’s efforts to protect them independently and said there was no justification for offering colonists greater access to vaccines than its Palestinian neighbors.
But Israeli officials said that while Israel has an interest in ensuring that Palestinians are vaccinated, many of them workers who frequently come into contact with Israelis, have no legal responsibility to do so.
Vaccines for covid19>
Answers to your vaccine questions
Currently, more than 150 million people – almost half the population – can be vaccinated. But each state makes the final decision about who goes first. The country’s 21 million health workers and three million residents in long-term care facilities were the first to qualify. In mid-January, federal authorities urged all states to open eligibility for all people aged 65 and over and for adults of any age with medical conditions that put them at high risk of becoming seriously ill or dying because of Covid- 19. Adults in the general population are at the rear of the line. If federal and state health officials can resolve bottlenecks in vaccine distribution, all 16 years and older will be eligible as early as this spring or early summer. The vaccine has not been approved in children, although studies are ongoing. It may take months for a vaccine to be available to anyone under the age of 16. Go to your state’s health website for up-to-date information on vaccination policies in your area
You should not have to pay anything out of your pocket to get the vaccine, although insurance information is requested. Even if you do not have insurance, you should receive the vaccine free of charge. Congress passed legislation this spring that prohibits insurers from applying any cost sharing, such as copayment or deductibles. He imposed additional protections, preventing pharmacies, doctors and hospitals from charging patients, including those without insurance. Even so, health experts fear that patients may run into loopholes that leave them vulnerable to unexpected bills. This can happen for those who are charged a medical consultation fee along with their vaccine, or Americans who have certain types of health coverage that do not fall under the new rules. If you get the vaccine at a doctor’s office or urgent care clinic, talk to them about possible hidden costs. To make sure you don’t get a surprise bill, the best bet is to get your vaccine at a vaccination post in the health department or at a local pharmacy as soon as the vaccines are more widely available.
This must be determined. It is possible that Covid-19 vaccines will become an annual event, as well as the flu vaccine. Or it may be that the benefits of the vaccine last for more than a year. We have to wait and see how durable vaccine protection is. To determine this, the researchers will screen vaccinated people for “innovative cases” – those people who fall ill with Covid-19 despite the vaccination. This is a sign of weakened protection and will give researchers clues as to how long the vaccine lasts. They will also monitor the levels of antibodies and T cells in the blood of vaccinated people to determine whether and when a booster injection may be needed. It is conceivable that people need reinforcements every few months, once a year or just every few years. It is just a matter of waiting for the data.
“We want everyone in the area to be vaccinated, but the Palestinian Authority is the party responsible for taking care of the health of the Palestinians,” said Yoav Kish, Israel’s deputy health minister. “Our responsibility is to vaccinate our own population,” he said, noting that Israeli health care providers were vaccinating Arab citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.
The Oslo Accords, interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, stated that the Palestinians would assume responsibility for health in the West Bank and Gaza, but also mentioned that Israel and the Palestinians should cooperate in fighting epidemics and contagious diseases.
Israel’s policy advocates argued that Israeli officials acted more quickly than their Palestinian colleagues to secure vaccine deals.
The Palestinian Authority initially did not lead public calls for Israel to vaccinate Palestinians.
Ahmad Majdalani, the Minister of Social Development, said the Palestinians did not publicly demand that Israel give them the vaccines at first because they thought they would get what they needed through international donations, contacts with pharmaceutical companies and private discussions with Israeli officials.
When it became clear that their strategy was not producing immediate results, Majdalani said they decided to start issuing statements demanding that Israel fulfill its “international duty” by providing vaccines.
Last week, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said that international law requires Israel to provide Palestinians with vaccines, but that Palestinians are still working “to find all the ways to find any vaccine. possible – whether English or Russian or Chinese. ”
Ghassan Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit University, argued that the Palestinians initially refrained from publicly asking Israel to give them the vaccines because they were reluctant to sound “contradictory”, seeking to obtain them independently and, at the same time, yielding responsibility to Israel.
Hussein al-Sheikh, the main Palestinian official responsible for coordinating with the Israelis, said the Palestinians had asked Israel for up to 10,000 doses in late December.
Israeli officials said that in addition to the thousands of vaccines that Israel transferred to the Palestinians this week, the country also delivered 200 doses to the Palestinians in January, but Al-Sheikh denied that.
Public health experts said they were more concerned that Palestinians would hesitate to be vaccinated.
“There is a lot of false information on social media that makes people afraid of being vaccinated,” said Abdulsalam al-Khayyat, head of the public health department at the medical school at An Najah University in Nablus.
Al-Khayyat predicted that about half of the Palestinian public was uncertain about receiving a vaccine, and he said that achieving collective immunity would not be possible without convincing a wide section of Palestinian society to be vaccinated.
“Ensuring that the public is vaccinated is the biggest challenge we face at the moment,” he said.
Patrick Kingsley contributed reporting from Jerusalem and Mohammed Najib from Ramallah, West Bank.