30.09.2024 | Online
Polio, Health and War in Gaza
A conversation between Mustafa Barghouti, President of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, and Andreas Wulf, Global Health Coordinator of medico international.
For almost a year now, Israeli military forces have laid to waste the occupied Gaza Strip to an extent that is widely agreed to go disproportionately beyond a military response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups. Hence, already since late January 2024, four months into the war, Israel is being investigated before the International Courts.
The systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure – for water and sewage, of apartment buildings and houses, hundreds of schools and all universities in the Strip, numerous hospitals, health centres and ambulances etc. – along with withholding of aid and the repeated mass displacement of the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s exceptionally young population have created conditions of death, despair and disease.
The re-emergence of the first polio case in 25 years in Gaza is only one but a stark indication to the disastrous health and hygiene situation in the coastal enclave. As the organized vaccination campaigns for hundred of thousands of children saw a limited humanitarian pause, a much-needed permanent ceasefire has not been agreed.
The Palestinian Medical Relief Society has been providing health services, including with support from medico international, to the Palestinian population for decades, both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where a significant, alarming militarisation of the Israeli occupation has been unfolding in places like Tulkarem and Jenin for over a year with marked recent escalations.
Hosted by medico’s Health Coordinator Andreas Wulf, Mustafa Barghouti will speak about the impact of the war on the Palestinian population, the situation of the health system and the role of local and international actors in this war and the decades long conflict.
Introduction by Chris Whitman, medico Office Director for Palestine & Israel
This event will be held in English.
Participation
via Zoom:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89978417347?pwd=SWyzwSJTltJeVZCXbc8pE0f5kt8tmg.1