What would you do if you were living in a refugee camp during a global pandemic? For the first time in months, Palestinian refugee camps are seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases raising concerns over the potentially devastating effects the virus can have on disadvantaged communities like the Dheisheh refugee camp.
Israel has been bombing Gaza for eight days straight, all as part of what Israel says is a response to incendiary balloons sent from Gaza into Israeli territory. “We’ve been through this countless times,” Omar Ghraieb, 33, a Palestinian journalist told Mondoweiss, “but it’s harder now with a global pandemic and the whole world falling apart, no electricity and no water.”
The pandemic has exposed the degree to which structural racism and cross generational trauma have public health consequences. From childhood to adulthood, people of color are at risk for stress related illnesses: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Now that list includes COVID-19.
Following an outbreak of the coronavirus, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled against a petition demanding that the Israeli Prison Service implement social distancing in the Gilboa prison. Adalah slammed the decision, “Palestinian prisoners have no right to social distancing protection against COVID-19.”
As the number of coronavirus cases in Palestine continue to soar, Israeli forces demolished a COVID-19 testing clinic in the city of Hebron, the epicenter of the outbreak in the occupied West Bank.
Earlier this week, Israeli forces issued an order threatening to demolish a field hospital in Hebron, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the occupied West Bank.
According to data released by the Small Business Administration, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces received a Paycheck Protection Program loan between $2 and $5 million in April.
“Despite going through two wars as a doctor in 2012 and 2014, the fear of this experience was greater than what I’ve been through before, its terms are way more than I imagined.” Three Palestinians in Gaza – an engineer, a doctor, and a fashion designer – share their personal diaries about what has changed about life in Gaza during the coronavirus pandemic, and what hasn’t.
Over the last week cases of COVID-19 have surged in Israel and the West Bank, prompting both governments to resume lock down measures in efforts to curb the second wave.
JVP’s Health Advisory Council examines the second wave of COVID-19 cases and how racism contributes to the outbreak.