Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what recent assessment his Department has made of the capacity of the Palestinian Ministry of Health to sustain a response to the covid-19 pandemic in the long term.

We remain in regular, close contact with the Palestinian Authority (PA) to discuss their ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will work closely with key partners, including the PA to support a coherent strategy to support recovery. The UK has provided £20 million in funding for this financial year to support the salaries of teachers, nurses and doctors. This will help the PA support its health workers who have been on the frontline battling coronavirus and who deliver life-saving medical services.

We are pleased that the OPTs will be among the first to benefit from the COVAX Advance Market Commitment (AMC) - the international initiative to support global equitable access to vaccines, with delivery of a first batch of 37,000 doses of the of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine anticipated in mid-February. This is a positive step towards tackling COVID-19 in the OPTs.