10:35 A.M. EDT

MODERATOR:  Hey, everyone.  Thanks for bearing with us for the last couple minutes.  Kirby has a few words here at the top, and then we’ll go into questions, as always.

MR. KIRBY:  Hey, good morning.  Thank you for joining us here again, but there are a few things that we do want to announce.

First, in the Western Hemisphere.  As I think you may have seen, in partnership with partners in the Western Hemisphere, early this morning, the United States government secured the release of 135 Nicaraguan political prisoners, including Catholic lay people, human rights defenders, students, and others who the government of Nicaragua consider a threat to their authoritarian rule.

In coordination with President Arévalo of Guatemala and his democratically elected government, the United States helped facilitate the transport of all 135 Nicaraguans to Guatemala, and they should be arriving there as we speak.

To our partners in Guatemala, we will help provide them with medical and trauma care, a place to stay, clothing and hygiene kits, along with other immediate support.  And I think it’s important that we don’t forget these are people who have been unjustly detained for months, some of them for years, without access to basic needs.

Thanks to President Biden’s Safe Mobility Offices initiative, one of which is located in Guatemala, these Nicaraguan citizens will be able to seek lawful pathways to migrate to a new country, and they’ll — and to rebuild their lives.  So it’s a real tangible example of what democracies can do working together to help people.

Turning to Gaza, if I might: Last Sunday, with strong support from the United States, the United Nations, led by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, began a campaign to vaccinate more than half a million children against polio.  The first reports of a polio outbreak in Gaza emerged in late July.  Immediately thereafter, the President directed his team to support WHO and UNICEF’s efforts and to help develop a comprehensive and efficient vaccination plan, recognizing that children under 10 were the most at risk.

We’ve worked closely with the government of Israel to facilitate the necessary access and safety of the vaccination campaign, including securing pauses in military operations and a commitment to timely deconfliction mechanisms.  And we’ve underscored the importance of reaching a critical threshold among children under 10 years old to help prevent the disease from spreading within Gaza and, quite frankly, across the region.

We are grateful for this cooperation and for the U.N. and other humanitarian workers who are doing this lifesaving work under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions.

So far, with just three days into the campaign, the estimate is that 189,000 children in Gaza have been vaccinated, and we look forward to continuing to do more over coming days.

The strong turnout that we have seen we believe is a testament to the superb planning that went into this campaign; the strong coordination between us, Israeli authorities, and the U.N.; as well as, quite frankly, the commitment of Palestinian families who don’t — like all families, they want to protect their kids.

In the coming days, this campaign must continue unimpeded throughout Gaza, and we are committed to that.  I want to be crystal clear, though, on one thing: The single most effective way to address this particular urgent challenge of polio and all the humanitarian challenges in Gaza is to reach an immediate ceasefire, enabling the release of all the hostages but also creating the conditions for additional lifesaving assistance to reach Palestinian civilians who are so much in need.  Their suffering simply must stop.

And as we’ve seen certainly in many other ways, but including the threat of polio: Real lives — and, in this case, in polio, real young lives — are hanging in the balance.

Finally, if I can — turning to Africa.
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