Israel will begin its national COVID-19 vaccination campaign on Saturday, but Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are seemingly still months away from receiving a vaccine.
Earlier this week residents of Hebron staged protests against the Palestinian Authority (PA) over renewed COVID-19 lockdowns across the West Bank, sparking clashes and confrontations between armed civilians and PA security forces.
The coronavirus continues to surge across the West Bank and Gaza, prompting Palestinian authorities to shut down entire cities, restrict movement, and for a first time threatened punitive damages for violations.
Human rights are understood to include civil, constitutional, individual, and collective rights. Palestinian citizens are deprived of all of these rights in the State of Israel.
Due to the rising numbers, the government announced a full-scale one week closure in select districts of the West Bank.
Palestinians surpassed a grim milestone this week with more than 100,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, as healthcare officials struggle to control the virus that has nearly overwhelmed hospitals in Gaza, and caused a weekend lockdown in the West Bank.
Health officials in Gaza say they are days away from running out of hospital beds, sounding the alarm as coronavirus cases continued to radically spike over the last week, sending younger patients to critical care wards for the first time.
Palestine saw the highest rate of daily infections of the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic in the past 24 hours, following the first weekend of newly imposed lockdowns in the West Bank.
Palestinians recorded 891 new COVID-19 cases on Saturday, the highest number of new infections in a 24-hour period to date, as health officials struggle to contain a surge in spread over the last month.