WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelled a deal on Friday to receive soon-to-expire COVID-19 vaccines from the Zionist regime after an initial shipment showed an expiration date sooner than had been agreed, the PA health minister said.
The occupying regime and the PA announced a vaccine swap deal earlier on Friday that would have seen the regime send up to 1.4 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses to the PA, in exchange for receiving a reciprocal number of doses from the PA later this year.
The doses were due to “expire soon”, Zionist Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office said in a statement announcing the deal. The PA said 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 said.
“After the technical teams in the ministry of health examined the first batch of the Pfizer vaccines that were received this evening from Israel, it became clear that the 90,000 doses received do not conform to the specifications contained in the agreement,” said PA spokesman Ibrahim Melhem at a joint press conference with Alkaila in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.
“Accordingly, Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh instructed the minister of health to cancel the agreement with the Israeli side on exchanging the vaccine and returning the quantity that was received today to Israel,” Melhem added.
Since the announcement, Palestinian officials came under heavy criticism on social media over the agreement on receiving soon-to-expire vaccines from the Zionist regime, with critics suggesting that the doses might not be effective.
Rights groups say Israel, as an occupying regime, is obliged to provide Palestinians with COVID-19 vaccines.
The Zionist regime has vaccinated nearly 85 percent of its population. Nevertheless, according to the Palestinian health ministry, just over 270,000 Palestinians have received two doses in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip, home to a combined 5.2 million people.