Attacking Palestinian Health

Dana El Kurd (0:07)

Hello everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana El Kurd. I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics.

Today I'm talking with Yara Asi, who is a Palestinian scholar, author and public health researcher, studying how conflict, structural violence and political systems shape health and human security.

And she's also a non-resident fellow at the Arab Center of Washington, where I'm also a non-resident fellow. And she's been doing a lot of excellent work highlighting the health impacts of Israeli policies and American policies in the Middle East generally, but also particularly in Israel, Palestine. So today we're going to talk about what are the health conditions in Gaza? I think that we have seen a lot of the spectacular violence we understand, and even the most unaware understand the degree to which Gaza has been devastated. But she breaks down for us what that looks like and what are the policies that are being used to attack Palestinian health in Gaza and in the West Bank, and then what it means for the Palestinian people to be so de-developed, not only economically, but at every sector, including the health sector. It's a very bleak episode. None of my episodes are good, but this one is particularly hard to listen to. There's also a mention of sexual violence. Not in detail, of course, but I do want to just put that out there for listeners as fair warning because that is a very triggering conversation regardless, even if it is at the simplest level of detail. But without further ado, this is Yara about the health impacts of Israeli policy on the Palestinian people. Thank you for listening.

Yara, thank you so much for being on the show.

Yara Asi (1:50)

Thank you for having me.

Dana El Kurd (1:52)

So I want to start, we're going to talk both about Gaza and the West Bank, but I want to start with Gaza at the beginning here. Could you give us a rundown of what health conditions are like in Gaza right now?

Yara Asi (2:03)

Yeah, absolutely. This has been obviously the focus of a lot of health research over the past three years, since the beginning of the genocide, and for good reason, because it's kind of a microcosm of every possible public health disaster you could imagine in a single, very small, very populated setting.

So just some top line numbers, we know that at the very least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th. And epidemiological projections estimate that the number is likely much higher, especially when you add in all of those that have died from starvation, malnutrition, or lack of access to health care because they had cancer or they needed a heart surgery or brain surgery or something. We know that at least 20,000, around 20,000 people in Gaza, many of whom are children, require immediate medical evacuations for some sort of procedure, unrelated typically to trauma. We're talking a lot of cancer cases, high-risk pregnancies, complex surgeries that they can no longer get in the Gaza Strip because the health care system has been essentially decimated. As of this past month, there's also more than 100,000 injuries. Many of those are life-changing injuries, amputations, nerve damage, spinal damage, brain damage, that will require lifelong rehabilitation, and the obvious question is, who's going to do that and who's going to pay for that, and what's going to happen to those people? Less than half of Gaza's hospitals are even partially functioning.

So prior to the genocide, Gaza had about 36 hospitals, many of which offered a variety of services, but some of which were specialized, cancer care, pediatric hospital. Now we're at a point where the hospitals that are even still open because so many were damaged, destroyed, or just have no resources, are just basically able to do basic care, emergency care, triage, basic wound management, Israel is still restricting at the border, medical supplies, basic pharmaceuticals, medications, things that would be available in basically any other context on earth, even in low income countries, are not available in the Gaza Strip. We know that 1,700 health workers and humanitarian workers have been killed in Gaza, many of whom were directly targeted either in their homes or in aid convoys. And it's an environmental disaster. So there's sewage in the streets, there's lack of clean water, there's rats, rats, yes, fighting people in their tents. God knows what floating in air that people are inhaling on a daily basis, including babies and children. So it is just as bad as we imagine. And we're about what, a year now from this quote unquote ceasefire. More than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the quote unquote ceasefire. And others are dying in other completely inhumane ways, such as building collapse that we saw a couple of weeks ago, because many people to avoid the rats and the cold, because winter is coming, have just decided, I'm going to go back to a structure, even if it is half collapsed.