Ramallah/Tel Aviv:
The Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelled a deal on Friday to get quickly-to-expire COVID-19 vaccines from Israel just after an initial Israeli shipment showed an expiration date sooner than had been agreed, the PA wellness minister mentioned.
Israel and the PA announced a vaccine swap deal earlier on Friday that would have seen Israel send up to 1.4 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses to the PA, in exchange for getting a reciprocal quantity of doses from the PA later this year.
The doses have been due to “expire soon”, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s workplace mentioned in a statement announcing the deal. The PA mentioned they had been “approved in order to speed up the vaccination process” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
“They told us the expiration date was in July or August, which would allow lots of time for use,” PA Health Minister Mai Alkaila told reporters later on Friday.
“But (the expiration) turned out to be in June. That’s not enough time to use them, so we rejected them,” she mentioned.
The PA cancelled the deal more than the date problem, a PA spokesman mentioned, and sent the initial shipment of about 90,000 doses back to Israel.
Bennett’s workplace did not straight away respond to a request for comment.
Rights groups have criticised Israel, which led one of the world’s swiftest vaccination campaigns, for not performing more to make sure Palestinian access to doses in the West Bank and Gaza territory it captured in a 1967 war.
Israeli officials argue that below the Oslo peace accords, the PA wellness ministry is accountable for vaccinating people today in Gaza and components of the West Bank exactly where it has restricted self-rule.
The vaccine deal was amongst initial policy moves towards the Palestinians by Bennett, who was sworn in on Sunday and replaced veteran leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
Around 55% of Israel’s 9.3 million population are completely vaccinated – a coverage price largely unchanged by this month’s expansion of eligibility to include things like 12- to 15-year-olds.
Some 30% of eligible Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, home to a combined 5.2 million people today, have received at least one vaccine dose, according to Palestinian officials.
According to a poll released on Tuesday by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 40% of Palestinians are prepared to take the vaccine after it is out there, though 35% say they and their households are not prepared to get vaccinated.
The Palestinians have received vaccine doses from Israel, Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates and the worldwide COVAX vaccine-sharing initiative.
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