We can expect an unprecedented surge of COVID-19 in Gaza in the coming weeks and a severely damaged health care system and exhausted health care workers unable to cope adequately. Prior to the bombing, 99% of the COVID-19 virus circulating in Palestine was from the highly contagious British Variant B.1.1.7. An estimated 5% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza had been vaccinated and mask use during Ramadan was lax. The positivity rate for coronavirus in Gaza was around 30% three weeks ago.
Israeli attacks on Gaza decimated the health sector, which included destroying doctors’ ability to confront COVID-19.
We are mentors for the We Are Not Numbers youth storytelling project. We work with Palestinian writers 18 to 30 years of age whose stories have been rendered largely invisible by the world. And we support the general strike by Palestinians on May 18.
Ordinarily, we dedicate this newsletter to the latest updates around the pandemic with an emphasis on distilling data to our readers. This week, because Israel is engaged in the most intense escalation across the occupied Palestinian territory in seven years, we’re shifting gears but still using our same approach.
The Latest: 838,850 Israelis tested positive for COVID-19; 831,387 recoveries; 6,374 deaths329,228 Palestinians tested positive…
As the latest surge in COVID-19 cases continues to strain Palestinian hospitals, in Gaza health officials have reimposed a widespread mandatory quarantine at government-designated centers for returning travelers.
Gaza’s hospitals are nearing capacity as a surge in coronavirus cases continued for another week, and the number of deaths has doubled from just seven days ago.
Once more, the holy month of Ramadan arrives while its tragedies are still festering, this time a surge in coronavirus cases in the occupied Palestinian territory.
COVID-19 did not invent systematic injustice, but it has exposed and sharpened injustices already there. Israel’s refusal to vaccinate Palestinians is but the latest chapter of its decades-long practice of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and, of course, apartheid against the Palestinian people. The U.S. is itself a settler-colony with centuries of systematic racism to its name, and the tolls of COVID-19 remain systematically centered around Indigenous, Black and brown people. There is a name for this, and it’s medical apartheid. It’s time to take a stand to end all military funding to an apartheid regime overseas and to demand the end to apartheid right here.
Palestinian volunteers clean the Al-Aqsa mosque compound ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan,…