The Palestinian Authority (PA) on Friday canceled an agreement with Israel that would have supplied up to 1.4 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to people in the West Bank and Gaza. Under the terms of the deal, Jerusalem would immediately provide the PA with critical vaccines in exchange for receiving an identical amount of inoculations from Ramallah later this year.
The exchange with Israel would have allowed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to be vaccinated months earlier than planned, thus placing the PA’s vaccination program ahead of many countries in the Middle East.
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Nevertheless, just hours after an initial shipment of 90,000 shots arrived in Ramallah, the PA backtracked on the arrangement. The official reason: The expiry date on the vaccines. “They told us the expiration date was in July or August, which would allow lots of time for use. But [the expiration] turned out to be in June. That’s not enough time to use them, so we rejected them,” PA Health Minister Mai al-Kaila alleged.
However, an Israeli security official said that the Pfizer shots were still good for another two weeks, which would have given the PA plenty of time to utilize the shipment. In fact, al-Kaila on Friday told the PA-run WAFA news agency that Palestinian health officials are capable of inoculating “about 80,000 citizens on a daily basis in more than 90 vaccination centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”
In other words: The 90,000 vaccines from Jerusalem could have already been administered over the weekend, but the PA nonetheless opted to reject the offer.
This, even though Israel has asserted that the expiration dates were known when the deal was struck. “The COVID vaccines we gave the Palestinian Authority were perfectly valid,” a statement from the Israeli Health Ministry added. “The Palestinians received the same vaccines that are currently given to Israelis.” Indeed, if stored correctly, there is no reason to believe that the quality of the COVID shots will deteriorate before the expiration date.
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So why did the PA refuse over a million vaccines, enough to fully inoculate some 24 percent of all Palestinians in the West Bank, or over 35 percent of the Gaza Strip? The reason can perhaps be gleaned from Palestinian public opinion. As political analyst Saleh al-Nuami commented: “The PA would not have backtracked on its shameful step were it not for the outrage expressed on social media.”
Many Palestinians criticized the vaccine exchange online, saying it was a form of “normalization with the Israeli occupation.” Moreover, rumors circulated that the Jewish state, in collusion with the PA, was trying to “poison” Palestinians with expired doses.
The agreement was also lambasted by Palestinian NGOs, which called for an investigation into the “scandal.” Within hours after the public backlash, Health Minister al-Kaila and PA spokesperson Ibrahim Melhem announced the cancellation of the deal. PA officials afterwards claimed that the agreement would have led to a “health disaster.” The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a US-designated terror group, falsely asserted that the vaccines “could have harmed human life.”
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While many Middle Eastern nations like Egypt (0.7 percent fully inoculated), Iran (1%), and Iraq (0.5%) are still struggling to obtain coronavirus vaccines, the Palestinian Authority refused what appeared to be perfectly good doses that could potentially save lives.
Yet, media failed to question the Palestinian leadership on the reasons it gave for not using the batch of vaccines, leaving Ramallah’s claim about the expiry date largely unchallenged. In doing so, news organizations are seemingly attempting to revive the thoroughly debunked libel that Israel is somehow preventing Palestinians from accessing COVID-19 inoculations.
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