Jerusalem – After several delays, Israel on Monday began vaccinating Palestinians working inside the country and at its settlements in the West Bank, more than two months after starting a lightning campaign to immunize its population.
Palestinian workers who went to Israel at various West Bank access controls received their first doses of the Moderna vaccine, administered by paramedics from the Magen David Adom health care service.
The operation organized by COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates government activities in the West Bank, has suffered successive postponements.
Some 100,000 Palestinian workers in the West Bank work in Israel and its settlements, considered by much of the international community to be illegal and an obstacle to peace.
Major General Kamil Abu Rukun, who heads the COGAT, said in a statement in Arabic that Israelis and Palestinians “live in the same epidemiological space” and that vaccinating Palestinians was a shared interest.
Israel has administered about 8.7 million doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine to its population of 9.3 million people. Some 3.7 million Israelis – more than 40 percent – have already received both doses. But until Monday, the government had provided few vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which underscored more general inequality and sparked international criticism.
Human rights groups and many Palestinians claim that as an occupying power, Israel is responsible for providing vaccines to the Palestinians. Israel says that under the interim peace agreements of the 1990s, it has no such obligation.
Israeli authorities have said the priority is to vaccinate the Israeli population first, while the Palestinian Authority has said it will get its own vaccines through a World Health Organization alliance with humanitarian organizations, known as COVAX .
So far, the Palestinian Authority has acquired sufficient doses for just 6,000 people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where nearly 5 million Palestinians live. He received 2,000 doses from Israel and purchased another 10,000 from a Russian-made vaccine. All of them require two doses per person.
Israel has also announced plans to share leftover vaccines with allies in Africa, Europe and Latin America, although the decision was stalled by legal details. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Danish and Austrian authorities on Thursday and said the three countries would join forces in the fight against COVID-19 with an investment in vaccine research and distribution.