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Warren, Van Hollen lead Senators in demanding Trump admin send aid to Palestine amid COVID-19 crisis

A group of Senators has sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging the administration to supply Gaza and the West Bank with much-needed humanitarian aid. There are already are at least 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the West Bank and multiple individuals have tested positive for the virus in Gaza. Gaza has been under siege for years and the densely populated area is bracing for a potentially catastrophic situation. Trump has frozen nearly all aid to Palestine since January 2018.

“Given the spread of the coronavirus in the West Bank and Gaza, the extreme vulnerability of the health system in Gaza, and the continued withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian people, we are concerned that the Administration is failing to take every reasonable step to help combat this public health emergency in the Palestinian Territories,” reads the letter. It was lead by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), but was also signed by  Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tom Udall (D-NM), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

“This is what leadership looks like,” tweeted Progress Up Consulting Senior Principal Josh Ruebner, “Senator Warren and 7 of her colleagues demand answers from Trump on what he is doing to restore US humanitarian aid to Palestinians to help them cope with COVID-19 under Israeli occupation and blockade.”

This week the progressive, Jewish organization IfNotNow announced that over 10,000 people had signed their petition demanding that Israel lift its blockade on Gaza in response to the crisis. “Palestinians in Gaza must now weather the Coronavirus in addition to the punishing, 15-year-long Israeli blockade of the coastal enclave,” said the group in a press release on the petition, “The international community must do everything it can to protect everyone in the world from this pandemic — and this must include the stateless Palestinians in Gaza, whose lives are controlled by the Israeli military. If there was ever a moment to realize that we are in this fight together, it is now.”

The group of Senators is requesting a response to their letter no later than April 6 and they’re asking for a detailed account of how the Trump administration is planning to assist the Palestinian people during this time.

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To lift the sanctions on Gaza, and even Iran, would be the most humane and decent thing to do. People are suffering and dying, and all because of the US, and Trump’s vindictive policies.

Trump does not know what it is to be humane, just like Bibi Netanyahu. They have no hearts, and are soulless.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-16-gaza-physicians-brace-impact

“Podcast Ep 16: Gaza physicians ‘brace for impact,’ Electronic Intifada, March 24, 2020 by Nora Barrows-Friedman

“The first two cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, have been confirmed in the Gaza Strip.

“Palestinians in the West Bank are on lockdown, compounded by the Israeli military occupation.

“Meanwhile, two million Palestinians confined by Israel in Gaza for the past 13 years are facing the crisis amidst a deliberate diminishing of Gaza’s health system capacity.

“Israel has continued to prohibit vital supplies from entering the territory.

“Dealing with a problem like the COVID-19 pandemic consists of three major pillars: diagnosis and identification of infected patients, protection of healthcare workers, and treatment, Dr. Tarek Loubani tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

“’In Gaza, [of] those three pillars of a response to an infectious pandemic like this – not one of them is intact.’

“Loubani is a Palestinian Canadian emergency doctor who has been working with Gaza-based physicians and designers to mitigate the overwhelming lack of basic medical supplies and electricity to operate hospitals and treat patients, as Israel and Egypt continue the blockade.

“’We’re not talking about small holes, we’re not talking about manageable defects, we’re talking about a complete absence of all of the things that you require to deal with a problem like this,’ he says.

“Loubani’s Glia project provides open-source designs for healthcare workers to manufacture their own personal protective equipment as well as stethoscopes, tourniquets and otoscopes. They have supplied face shields to medical facilities in Canada to address the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

“Loubani tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast that Gaza physicians were the ones to design the face shields that are being used in Canada now.

“’So clearly, that’s a product that [Gaza physicians] are going to go forward with,’ he says.

“Reidun Garapick, a medical student and the communications director of the Glia project, tells The Electronic Intifada that Glia is trying to address the concept of reusability of personal protective equipment.

“’If we create [this protective equipment] that can be reused safely, that can be sanitized, that the life span can be prolonged, it’s going to be lower cost for hospitals but it’s also going to protect the health care providers to the same degree and it’s going to help the environment,’ she explains.

“In Gaza, disposable N95 masks – crucial protection for healthcare workers to shield themselves from the virus, which is spread by airborne droplets – are in extremely short supply.

“Loubani is working with his Gaza colleagues to figure out a way to disinfect N95 masks in order to reduce the number they will need to bring in, especially as Israel and Egypt maintain the blockade.”

Some welcome leadership in the inevitable process of freeing Americans as well as Palestinians from the grip of the bigoted ideology of Zionism.
“Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/israels-stranglehold-on-american-politics/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30730-3/fulltext

“Structural violence in the era of a new pandemic: the case of the Gaza Strip”

The Lancet, March 27, 2020
By David Mills, Bram Wispelwey, Rania Muhareb, Mads Gilbert

“’Hope for improving health and quality of life of Palestinians will exist only once people recognise that the structural and political conditions that they endure…are the key determinants of [Palestinian] population health.’”1

“As the world is consumed by the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it should be of no surprise that epidemics (and indeed, pandemics) are disproportionately violent to populations burdened by poverty, military occupation, discrimination, and institutionalised oppression.2 Structural violence rooted in historical, political, and social injustices determines health patterns and creates vulnerabilities that hamper the effective prevention, detection, and response to communicable disease outbreaks. In the occupied Gaza Strip, the convergence of these forces in the era of a pandemic have the potential to devastate one of the world’s most vulnerable populations.2, 3

“The colonial fragmentation of the Palestinian people and their health systems, combined with a neoliberal development framework implemented during the past decades, has created a profound dependency on aid, placing health care at the mercy of increasingly restrictive international donor politics.4, 5 Since 2007, Israel has imposed a crippling land, air, and sea blockade over the Gaza Strip’s 2 million Palestinians, 1·4 million of whom are refugees,6 subjecting them to extreme crowding in one of the world’s most densely populated regions.7

“As a result, the Gaza Strip faces high levels of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and lacks sufficient clean water5, 8 while the blockade disrupts medical supply chains, curtails the movement of patients and health workers, and severely inhibits medical capacity-building and public health development.9 Preventive measures and containment of COVID-19 will be extremely difficult now that the pandemic has reached the Gaza Strip. While prisoners in Iran10 and elsewhere are temporarily being released to protect them from contained spread, for Palestinians, living in what is described as the largest open-air prison in the world,11 there is nowhere to go—unless, of course, they are granted their legal and moral right of return.12

“Guided by our moral values and professional obligations, the international community must act now to end structural violence by confronting the historical and political forces entrenching a cyclical, violent, and mutable reality for Palestinians.13

“A COVID-19 pandemic that further cripples the Gaza Strip’s health-care system should not be viewed as an inevitable biomedical phenomenon experienced equally by the world’s population, but as a preventable biosocial injustice rooted in decades of Israeli oppression and international complicity in the struggle for the health, fundamental rights, and self-determination of all Palestinians.”

“We declare no competing interests.”

References included in article.

This most certainly is NO TIME to play with peoples’ lives.