A just-announced deal for Israel to bolster the Palestinian vaccination drive collapses.
Israel had agreed to send up to 1.4 million doses, to be replaced by the Palestinians later. The Palestinian Authority said the first tranche was too close to expiration, which Israel denies.
JERUSALEM — A deal to supply Palestinians with more than one million unused Israeli coronavirus vaccine doses collapsed Friday night, just hours after it was first announced, amid a public disagreement between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships about whether or not the vaccines were too close to their expiry date.
The new Israeli government said Friday morning that it would give between 1 million and 1.4 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to the Palestinian Authority in a trade that would see the authority donate a similar number back to Israel once its own supply arrives in September or October.
But the authority later rejected the entire deal after receiving a first tranche of about 100,000 doses on Friday evening. A spokesman for the authority, Ibrahim Melhem, said that the specifications of the doses did not conform to the agreement, and that they were too close to their expiry date to be administered in time.
The authority will instead wait for a direct delivery of four million new vaccines from Pfizer later in the year, Mr. Melhem said.
An Israeli official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the initial batch of doses would expire at the start of July, which was enough time for Palestinian health workers enough time to administer them.
The official added that the authority had been aware of their expiry date before agreeing to their delivery, and said the authority had only scrapped the deal because they had been criticized by Palestinians for agreeing to receive vaccines perceived to be of poor quality.
The official also said that none of the remaining 900,000 doses would have been delivered less than two weeks before their expiry date.
Negotiations over the deal began in secret several months ago, before Naftali Bennett’s new government succeeded that of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was replaced by a narrow vote in Parliament last Sunday.
The announcement follows months of debate about whether Israel, where a successful vaccine campaign has created a largely post-pandemic reality, has a moral or legal responsibility to give its spare vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where infection rates are far higher.
In February and March, Israel gave vaccines to more than 100,000 Palestinians who work as day laborers in Israel, but resisted vaccinating millions of other Palestinians living under some form of Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza.
Instead, the Palestinian Authority ordered several hundred thousand vaccine doses from the global sharing initiative, Covax, and several million from Pfizer-BioNTech. Separately, the United Arab Emirates donated tens of thousands of doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine to Palestinians in Gaza.
Israeli officials said that the Oslo Accords, the interim agreements between Israel and Palestinian leaders signed in the 1990s, give the Palestinian Authority responsibility for its own health care system.
But rights campaigners noted that other parts of the Oslo Accords require Israel to work with the Palestinian leadership during an epidemic, while the Fourth Geneva Convention obliges an occupying power to coordinate with the local authorities to maintain public health within an occupied territory, including during epidemics.
Israel controls all imports to the West Bank, most of which is under full Israeli control, and shares control of imports to Gaza with Egypt.
Those who accepted Israel’s narrative about the donations said the authority’s refusal to accept the vaccines had dented claims that Israel was to blame for the slow vaccination rate among Palestinians. But those who believed the Palestinian narrative said that Israel had acted in bad faith by making the authority an offer that it had no choice but to refuse.
Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley
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