Alice Cuddy
Reporting from Israel

I’ve just received a voice note from a close friend of 40-year-old Carmel Gat - one of the six hostages whose bodies were recovered in southern Gaza on Saturday.

Gat, an occupational therapist, was kidnapped on 7 October from Kibbutz Be’eri, where she was staying with her parents.

Shir Guttentag, who grew up with Gat in the kibbutz, describes her as “a very good friend to everyone”.

“She was an amazing person - always hugging everybody. I know she was doing yoga and meditation in Gaza. She was spiritual and very positive."

Guttentag says that until today, she had felt sure that Gat would be coming home.

“It's so sad and not what I expected. I saw her coming back."

She learned of her friend’s death this morning while getting her two young daughters ready for their first day of the new school year.

“It was terrible - the mix of excitement for school and the big sadness for Carmel… I don’t know how we can get through this day," she says.

Earlier, we reported how Israel has said its forces have recovered the bodies of six hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

There remain more than 100 hostages, external unaccounted for following the attacks on 7 October last year (a figure that includes four who were taken hostage in 2014 and 2015, two of whom are believed to be dead).

Though polio is a disease that mainly affects people under the age of five, and this particular vaccination campaign is focused on children under 10, it can still be contracted by anyone who has not been vaccinated against the virus that causes it.

In a statement posted on X, external on Thursday, a spokesperson for the Hostages Families Forum (a group calling for more action to secure the release of Israeli hostages) said the vaccination campaign would not be “complete” if “abductees” were not also protected.

Writing to the UN agencies tasked with the coordination of the campaign - the WHO and Unicef - Professor Hagai Levine says: “Supporting and advancing the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza is vital not only for controlling the current outbreak but also for safeguarding the health of all the individuals in the region, including the hostages who remain at grave risk.

“It is crucial that this campaign includes the hostages, particularly children.”

He adds that many of the adult hostages are overdue for both polio and tetanus booster shoots.

Though the official polio vaccine rollout began in Gaza this morning with the first of three "'humanitarian pauses", there were reports on Saturday that some children in the region had already begun receiving the vaccine.

In these photos from yesterday, you can see health workers administering the oral drops of the vaccine at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Image source, EPA

Image source, Reuters

Image source, EPA

Alice Cuddy
Reporting from Israel

We’ve just spoken over the phone to people in a school in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza that is being used as a polio vaccination point.

A journalist there says the vaccinations started at 08:00 local time (06:00 BST) and that there were “a lot of people queuing”.

“It’s very crowded at the school, there are a lot of people coming for vaccinations,” he says.

One of the nurses administering the vaccinations, Osama Al-Baleed, tells me it was “brilliant” to see so many people coming, and that more were arriving as we spoke.

Smitha Mundasad
Health reporter

Image source, EPA

Polio is a serious and very infectious disease that mostly affects children under the age of five.

It is caused by a virus that can spread very easily through contact with an infected person’s faeces or less commonly through contaminated food or water.

The virus does not always cause symptoms but in some one in 200 infections, external it can enter the brain and nervous system and lead to paralysis. This can happen in a matter of hours.

And for 5 to 10% of people who are paralysed, the infection leads to death because it immobilises the muscles used to breathe.

Most people alive today have had a series of childhood vaccinations to help prevent polio and the illness is now rare.

But before the launch of a global eradication campaign in 1988, hundreds of thousands of children got polio each year.

Many countries have kept it at bay with high rates of routine childhood vaccination. The UK has had no confirmed cases of paralysis due to polio caught in the country since 1984.

But it still has a constant presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And there continue to be outbreaks around the world – particularly where conflict and natural disasters interrupt vaccination programmes and destroy water and sanitation systems.

The first in a series of humanitarian pauses in the Gaza Strip is starting this morning, with healthcare workers hoping to vaccinate 640,000 children under the age of 10 against polio over the course of the next few weeks.

UN officials have said the campaign will be carried out in three-day phases across the besieged territory.

The World Health Organization(WHO) has approved the release of 1.6 million doses of the polio vaccine and Unicef is co-ordinating their delivery starting in the central Deir Al-Balah region from 1 to 4 September, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah said.

The second phase of the vaccine rollout will begin on 5 September and will take place over three days in the Khan Younis region before finishing in Gaza City and northern Gaza from 9 September.

Children under the age of 10 – highlighted in the map below – will receive two oral doses of the polio vaccination in this first round before they need a repeat round in four weeks’ time, UN officials have said.

Yolande Knell
Middle East correspondent, in Jerusalem

Image source, Getty Images

Since it was detected in wastewater samples, there has only been one confirmed case of a child suffering from polio in Gaza who was left partly paralysed.

But the World Health Organization (WHO) believes there could be other unconfirmed serious cases and that many more people are likely to be infected without showing symptoms, while spreading this highly contagious disease.

Polio attacks the nervous system and in its most severe form it can cause paralysis. This can lead to difficulties with breathing and even death. There is no cure.

WHO experts say that polio could easily take hold in war-torn Gaza. Nine in 10 people have been displaced by the ongoing fighting and most now live in crowded, insanitary conditions - with polio transmitted through faecal matter.

Routine childhood vaccinations have been disrupted and health services are close to collapse, making it less likely that polio will be quickly diagnosed.

A serious outbreak in Gaza could also reach the wider Middle East. Dr Hamid Jafari, the WHO’s director of polio eradication in the region, says: “Given the high force of transmission in Gaza, there is a risk of this spilling over into Israel, into the West Bank and surrounding countries.”

Image source, HANDOUT

Hours before the UN-led polio vaccination campaign was set to start, Israel announced that its forces have recovered the bodies of six hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the bodies were located on Saturday in an underground tunnel in the Rafah area.

The IDF named the hostages as Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi and Master Sgt Ori Danino.

Spokesman Rear Adm Daniel Hagari said an initial assessment was they were "brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists shortly before we reached them".

After the death of Goldberg-Polin - an American citizen - was confirmed, US President Joe Biden said he was "devastated and outraged" by the news.

In its statement on Sunday morning, the IDF said the bodies had been "returned to Israeli territory".

"They were all taken hostage on 7 October [2023] and were murdered by the Hamas terrorist organisation in the Gaza Strip."

The statement added that their families had already been notified.

Meanwhile, President Biden said in a statement that "Hersh was among the innocents brutally attacked while attending a music festival for peace in Israel on 7 October".

• Read more about this developing story here

Johanna Chisholm
Live page editor

Image source, Reuters

This morning, healthcare workers across the Gaza Strip are going to begin embarking on a multi-day effort to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children against the virus that can cause polio.

This historic effort was triggered earlier this summer after samples from the territory’s wastewater showed an early variant of type 2 poliovirus had been found.

And then last month, the first infection in more than 25 years was detected in a 10-month-old child.

A humanitarian pause in the fighting has been agreed to, which will be in effect for set hours each day as relief workers attempt to make their way across the 41km (10 mile) long strip to inoculate 640,000 children under the age of 10.

But outside of the ongoing hostilities, it’s an effort that’s guaranteed to present a number of logistical challenges.

The vaccines, for instance, need to be continuously stored in a limited temperature range – from the moment they are manufactured until they are administered.

And with temperatures today expected to reach 29C (84 F), it’ll be just one of the many hurdles that administrators need to navigate - all with limited resources.

We’re going to be bringing you live coverage of this mass vaccination campaign here on this page, so please stay with us as we bring you the latest developments.