Today’s Middle East is a cauldron of boiling rage. Over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces found six hostages dead — young Israelis who survived nearly a year in captivity in Gaza only to be shot by their captors just short of their rescue.

At the same time, a feared outbreak of polio in Gaza has led Israel and Hamas to agree to limited pauses in fighting to allow for the inoculation of over 600,000 Palestinian children.

While enormously difficult, health diplomacy can be a powerful force for good, even amid the chaos and destruction of war.

Leading Middle East expert Suzanne Maloney wrote in a Brookings Institution report this year that “the Hamas massacres on October 7 and Israel’s subsequent invasion of the Gaza Strip have victimized, traumatized, and displaced both peoples in profound and enduring ways.”

Could this vaccine effort be the beginning of the long journey to a possible permanent end to hostilities?

In Gaza, we may never really know how many are dead — buried beneath tunnels or trapped in rubble or lost in makeshift morgues. And for the families of hostages, there is continued grief and loss, trauma and rage that cannot simply be healed. But we know that polio will only lead to more death.

As someone who has worked on conflict resolution my entire life, I know that to fully contain a conflict, you must contain anger. Anger breeds misperception that can be generational in nature.

The anger in the Middle East is pervasive, extending beyond the conflict in Gaza into areas like the West Bank where Israeli forces are conducting raids to root out terrorists and weapons they believe are being shipped in by Iran to further destabilize the region.

And there are international implications as Hamas’ allies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi rebels in Yemen, have worked to further ignite the fires of conflict. The Houthis’ attacks and threats on international shipping have caused major economic fallout, as shipping companies redirect their cargo around Africa to avoid Houthi missile and drone attacks.

Despite the hostilities and enormous challenges, the work of peacebuilding must go on, and a pause for vaccination is a good step.

Cautious optimism is in order today given how in the past, deep disappointment and despair from failed frameworks and false starts in peace negotiations left each side profoundly dubious of the other.

Global pandemics and outbreaks of diseases like polio, malaria and COVID-19 often open a window of opportunity to let humanity prevail — something the World Health Organization has long advocated for.

The U.S. government has used health diplomacy many times through the United States Agency for International Diplomacy’s Initiative for Global Vaccine Access, known as Global Vax.

“Through Global VAX,” according to USAID, “the U.S. government leveraged its decades of investment in global health and diplomatic partnerships to help 120 partner countries deliver lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines to millions of people.”

Vaccines are a powerful instrument to lower the temperature in highly stressed war zones.

At the end of the day, a break in fighting is better than more conflict. But there is work ahead. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, “It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”

Tara Sonenshine (Tara.Sonenshine@tufts.edu) served as U.S. undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and is a senior nonresident fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University