Over more than a year of war, I have volunteered to help my people in Gaza, wrapping friends and family into shrouds, but also helping bring new life into the world.
Israel has barred at least six international medical NGOs that had been providing crucial support to Gaza’s decimated healthcare sector. Doctors in the banned groups say the move could result in thousands of additional deaths.
Thousands of lives are at risk as Al-Shifa Hospital becomes non-operational, with ICUs and incubators shutting down due to lack of fuel, and medical staff and patients trapped waiting to die. Israeli forces continue to shell hospitals in north Gaza.
UN agencies report that fuel shortages will force Gaza hospitals, desalination plants, and bakeries to close, indirectly killing many. “The situation is catastrophic. Civilians, especially children, continue to pay the heaviest price,” says Save the Children.
Dr. Lina Qasem-Hassan on how the Israeli healthcare system discriminates against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territory.
Israel is putting its commitment to Jewish supremacy above the functioning of its healthcare system, proposing rejecting graduates of Palestinian universities in favor of “Jewish purity.”
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.