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Tag: disease

  • Israel using water as weapon of war as Gaza supply plummets by 94%, creating deadly health catastrophe: Oxfam 

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    Israel damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation sites every three days since the start of this war

    A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.  

    The report, Water War Crimes, finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person – just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush.   

     Oxfam analysis also found:  

    • Israeli military attacks have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days since the start of the war.  
    • The destruction of water and electricity infrastructure and restrictions on entry of spare parts and fuel (on average a fifth of the required amount is allowed in) saw water production drop by 84% in Gaza. External supply from Israel’s national water company Mekorot fell by 78%.  
    • Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza, and restricted the entry of Oxfam water testing equipment.  
    • Gaza City has lost nearly all its water production capacity, with 88% of its water wells and 100% of its desalination plants damaged or destroyed.  

    The report also highlighted the dire impact of this extreme lack of clean water and sanitation on Palestinians’ health, with more than a quarter (26%) of Gaza’s population falling severely ill from easily preventable diseases.  

    In January, the International Court of Justice demanded that Israel immediately improve humanitarian access in light of a plausible genocide in Gaza. Since then, Oxfam has witnessed firsthand Israel’s obstruction of a meaningful humanitarian response, which is killing Palestinian civilians.  

    “We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.”  

    Oxfam Water and Sanitation Specialist Lama Abdul Samad said it was clear that Israel had created a devastating humanitarian emergency resulting in Palestinian civilian deaths.  

    “We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.  

    “But the deliberate restriction of access to water is not a new tactic. The Israeli Government has been depriving Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza of safe and sufficient water for many years,” she said.   

    “The widespread destruction and significant restrictions on aid delivery in Gaza impacting access to water and other essentials for survival, underscores the urgent need for the international community to take decisive action to prevent further suffering by upholding justice and human rights, including those enshrined in the Geneva and Genocide Conventions.”  

     Monther Shoblak, General Manager of the Gaza Strip’s water utility CMWU, said:   

    “My colleagues and I have been living through a nightmare these past nine months, but we still feel it’s our responsibility and duty to ensure everybody in Gaza is getting their minimum right of clean drinking water. It’s been very difficult, but we are determined to keep trying – even when we witness our colleagues being targeted and killed by Israel while undertaking their work.”   

    Oxfam is calling for urgent action including an immediate and permanent ceasefire; for Israel to allow a full and unfettered humanitarian response; and for Israel to foot the reconstruction bill for water and sanitation infrastructure.  

    Read Oxfam’s “Water War Crimes” full report.

  • If Earth gets sick, so do you

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    Alones/Shutterstock

    Jack Marley, The Conversation

    A hotter world is likely to be a sicker world.

    Earth’s growing fever has obvious repercussions for human health, like heatwaves that are hotter than our physiology can tolerate. Humanity’s departure from the stable climate it inherited will yield surprises, too, though. Some of those may be existing diseases appearing in new places or spreading with greater ferocity. And some, experts fear, may be new diseases entirely.

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    The mosquito-borne infection malaria killed more than half a million people each year during the last decade. Most of these victims were children and almost all (95% in 2022) were in Africa.

    As a source of disease, infectious mosquitoes are at least predictable in their need for three things: warm temperatures, humid air and puddles to breed in. So what difference will global heating make?

    Parasites are on the march

    “The relationship between climate and malaria transmission is complex and has been the subject of intense study for some three decades,” say water and health experts Mark Smith (University of Leeds) and Chris Thomas (University of Lincoln).

    Much of this research has focused on sub-Saharan Africa, the global epicentre of malaria cases and deaths. Smith and Thomas combined temperature and water movement projections to produce a continent-wide analysis of malaria risk.

    Their results showed that the conditions for malaria transmission will become less suitable overall, especially in west Africa. But where temperature and humidity are likely to suit infectious mosquitoes in future also happens to be where lots more people are expected to live, near rivers like the Nile in Egypt.

    Reflected surface of a pond with small insects on it.
    Mosquitoes lay eggs in stagnant water.
    Hussain Warraich/Shutterstock

    “This means the number of people living in potentially malaria endemic areas (suitable for transmission more than nine months a year) will increase by 2100 to over a billion,” they say.

    Elsewhere, tropical diseases will slip their bonds as the insects carrying them survive further from the equator. This is already happening in France, where dengue fever cases spiked during the hot summer of 2022.

    “It seems that the lowlands of Veneto [in Italy] are emerging as an ideal habitat for the Culex mosquitoes, which can host and transmit West Nile virus,” adds Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton.

    Research suggests that the global transmission of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue will change, says Mark Booth, a senior lecturer in parasite epidemiology at Newcastle University. That’s as clear a picture as Booth could conjure from modelling more than 20 tropical diseases in a warming world.

    “For most other parasites, there was little or no evidence. We simply don’t know what to expect,” he says.

    Some diseases will bring fresh torment for the species humans farm. Bluetongue, a virus transmitted by midges, is expected to infect sheep further afield – in central Africa, western Russia and the US – than subtropical Asia and Africa where it evolved, Booth says.

    And the prognoses for some diseases afflicting humans will worsen. UCL academics Sanjay Sisodiya, a neuroscientist and Mark Maslin, an earth system scientist, found that climate change is exacerbating the symptoms of certain brain conditions.

    “Each of the billions of neurons in our brain is like a learning, adapting computer, with many electrically active components,” they say. “Many of these components work at a different rate depending on the ambient temperature, and are designed to work together within a narrow range of temperatures.”

    A species that evolved in Africa, humans are comfortable between 20˚C and 26˚C and within 20% and 80% humidity, Sisodiya and Maslin say. Our brain is already working close to the limit of its preferred temperature range in most cases, so even small increases matter.

    “When those environmental conditions move rapidly into unaccustomed ranges, as is happening with extreme temperatures and humidity related to climate change, our brain struggles to regulate our temperature and begins to malfunction.”

    A brain scan.
    The human brain is sensitive to rising temperatures.
    Semnic/Shutterstock

    One planet, one health

    Clearly, staying healthy isn’t as simple as regulating what you eat or how often you exercise. There is a lot that is beyond your immediate control.

    “Within less than three years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared two public health emergencies of international concern: COVID-19 in February 2020 and monkeypox in July 2022,” says Arindam Basu, an associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the University of Canterbury.

    “At the same time, extreme weather events are being reported continuously across the world and are expected to become more frequent and intense. These are not separate issues.”

    Basu highlights the danger of new diseases emerging, particularly from pathogens that could jump between humans and animals as habitats change amid global heating.

    “Close contact between humans and wild animals is increasing as forests are destroyed to make way for agriculture and trade in exotic animals continues,” he says. “At the same time, the thawing of permafrost is releasing microbes hidden beneath the ice.”

    Since pathogens share the same ecosystems as the humans and animals they infect, a new conception of health is urgently needed. This should aim to optimise the health of people, wildlife and the environment, Basu says.

    Diseases. Again, the climate crisis exposes our countless connections to everything else – and our shared frailty on the only planet known to harbour life.The Conversation

    Jack Marley, Environment + Energy Editor, The Conversation

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • ‘Enough Is Enough’: Ireland Joins ICJ Genocide Case Against Israel

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    Original article byBRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Palestinian and South African flags are seen at a January 13, 2024 protest for Gaza in Dublin, Ireland.  (Photo: Stringer/Andalou via Getty Images)

    “What we saw on October 7 in Israel, and what we are seeing in Gaza now, represents the blatant violation of international humanitarian law on a mass scale,” said one top Irish official.

    Citing Israel’s “blatant” human rights violations in Gaza, Ireland’s second-highest-ranking official said Wednesday that the country will join the South Africa-led genocide case before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

    Irish Tánaiste Micheál Martin—the equivalent of a deputy prime minister in other parliamentary nations—said that Ireland decided to intervene in the case after analyzing the “legal and policy issues” pertaining to the case under review by the United Nations’ top court.

    “It is for the court to determine whether genocide is being committed,” Martin—who also serves as Ireland’s foreign and defense minister—said in a statement. “But I want to be clear in reiterating what I have said many times in the last few months; what we saw on October 7 in Israel, and what we are seeing in Gaza now, represents the blatant violation of international humanitarian law on a mass scale.”

    Martin continued:

    The taking of hostages. The purposeful withholding of humanitarian assistance to civilians. The targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure. The indiscriminate use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The use of civilian objects for military purposes. The collective punishment of an entire population.

    The list goes on. It has to stop. The view of the international community is clear. Enough is enough. The U.N. Security Council has demanded an immediate cease-fire, the unconditional release of hostages, and the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale. The European Council has echoed this call.

    South Africa’s case—which is supported by over 30 countries, the Arab League, African Union, and others—incisively details Israel’s conduct in the war, including the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children; the wounding of tens of thousands more; the forcible displacement of 90% of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million people; and the inflicting of conditions leading to widespread starvation and disease. The filing also cited numerous genocidal statements by Israeli officials.

    On January 26, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and ordered its government and military to prevent genocidal acts. Palestinian and international human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order.

    A draft report released this week by the U.N.’s Human Rights Council found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.

    “The situation could not be more stark; half the population of Gaza face imminent famine and 100% of the population face acute food insecurity,” said Martin. “As the U.N. secretary-general said as he inspected long lines of blocked relief trucks waiting to enter Gaza during his visit to Rafah at the weekend: ‘It is time to truly flood Gaza with lifesaving aid. The choice is clear: surge or starvation.’ I echo his words today.”

    In a St. Partick’s Day White House meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden—a staunch supporter of Israel—Irish Toaiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, who announced earlier this month that he would soon step down, said that “the Irish people are deeply troubled about the catastrophe that’s unfolding before our eyes in Gaza.”

    “And when I travel the world, leaders often ask me why the Irish have such empathy for the Palestinian people,” he added. “And the answer is simple: We see our history in their eyes—a story of displacement, of dispossession and national identity questioned and denied, forced emigration, discrimination, and now hunger.”

    Original article byBRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

  • Draft UN Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide

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    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    The bodies of victims of the October 31, 2023 Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip are lined up outside the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City.  (Photo: Fadi Alwhidi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure.”

    The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.

    The advance unedited version of the report—entitled Anatomy of a Genocide—concludes that Israel’s far-right government and military “have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”

    “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” the draft report states, enumerating Israeli actions that violate Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

    “Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting,’ thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable,” the paper continues. “In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza, and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.”

    Israel rejected the report as “an obscene inversion of reality.”

    According to Palestinian and international humanitarian officials, Israel’s 171-day Gaza onslaught has killed at least 32,333 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while wounding nearly 75,000 others and displacing around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people. Thousands more Palestinians are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. Disease and deadly starvation caused and exacerbated by Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza are spreading rapidly.

    “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure,” the draft report asserts. “For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group—demographically, culturally, economically, and politically—seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.”

    Referring to the flight and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the paper contends that “the ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.”

    “The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all.”

    The draft report urges U.N. member states to “enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their… obligations” under international law. In January, the U.N.’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel was “plausibly” perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordered the country’s government to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts. Human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order.

    “Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death, and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people,” the publication argues.

    The draft report recommends measures including:

    • Immediate implementation of an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ;
    • Immediate referral of the situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court in support of its ongoing investigation;
    • Ensuring that Israel, as well as states who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to nonrepetition, with measures for prevention and full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza;
    • Deploying an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied territories; and
    • Ensuring that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.

    Israel on Monday informed the U.N. that it will no longer allow UNRWA convoys carrying food aid into northern Gaza, even as the Palestinians are starving to death, a move that one humanitarian campaigner called a “death sentence.”

    Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

  • Biden’s Complicity in Gaza Is Making It More Likely Fascist Trump Will Win

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    Original article by NORMAN SOLOMON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event at Mother Emanuel AME Church on January 8, 2024 in Charleston, South Carolina.  (Photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

    The electoral base that Biden is going to need for re-election is heavily against his support for Israel’s war on Gaza. There is no way to hide from that fact.

    For more than four months, President Biden has been the main enabler for Israel’s mass murder of Palestinian people in Gaza. Every day, hundreds of civilians are killed by U.S. weaponry and, increasingly, by hunger and disease. The cruelty and magnitude of the slaughter are repugnant to anyone who isn’t somehow numb to the human agony.

    Such numbing is widespread in the United States. Some factors include ethnocentric, racial, and religious biases against Arabs and Muslims. The steep pro-Israel tilt of news media runs parallel to the slant of U.S. government officials, with language that routinely conveys much lower regard for Palestinian lives than Israeli lives.

    And while the credibility of the Israeli government has tumbled, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby—notably AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel—still exert enormous leverage over the vast majority of Congress. Few legislators are willing to vote against massive military aid that makes the carnage in Gaza possible.

    Instead of candor, the routine choices have been euphemisms and silence. But—morally and politically—that’s a big mistake.

    A chilling example is Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. On Monday night, he took to the Senate floor and condemned Israel in no uncertain terms. “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food,” he said. “In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true. That is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.”

    Watching video from Van Hollen’s impassioned speech, you might assume that he would vote against sending $14 billion in further military aid to those “war criminals.” But hours later, he did just the opposite. As journalist Ryan Grim noted, “the senator’s speech pulsed with moral clarity—until it petered out into a stumbling rationale for his forthcoming yes vote.”

    In contrast, three senators in the Democratic caucus—Jeff Merkley, Peter Welch, and Bernie Sanders—voted no. Sanders delivered a powerful speech calling for decency instead of further moral collapse from the top of the U.S. government.

    While the Senate deliberated, the White House again made clear that it wasn’t serious about getting in the way of Israel’s planned assault on the city of Rafah. That’s where most of Gaza’s 2.2 million surviving residents have taken unsafe refuge from the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces.

    An exchange at a White House news conference on Monday underscored that Biden is determined to keep enabling Israel’s continuous war crimes in Gaza:

    Reporter: “Has the president ever threatened to strip military assistance from Israel if they move ahead with a Rafah operation that does not take into consequence what happens with civilians?”

    Spokesman John Kirby: “We’re going to continue to support Israel. They have a right to defend themselves against Hamas and we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities to do that.”

    Later this week, Politico summed up: “The Biden administration is not planning to punish Israel if it launches a military campaign in Rafah without ensuring civilian safety.” Citing interviews with three U.S. officials, the article reported that “no reprimand plans are in the works, meaning Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences.”

    Biden continues to serve as an accomplice while mouthing platitudes of concern about the lives of civilians in Gaza. Month after month, he has done all he can to supply the Israeli military to the max.

    With just eight months until the voting starts that could propel Donald Trump back into the presidency, the prospect of his return to power is all too real.

    Under an apt headline—“Biden Is Mad at Netanyahu? Spare Me.”—The Nation senior editor Jack Mirkinson wrote this week: “In the real world, Biden and his legislative partners have continued to arm Israel; the Democratic leadership in the Senate actually brought people in on Super Bowl Sunday to take a vote on a bill that would, along with rearming Ukraine, send Israel another $14.1 billion for what is euphemistically dubbed ‘security assistance.’”

    Ever since October, inspiring protests and activism in the United States have challenged U.S. support for Israel’s military assault on Gaza. However, boosted by revulsion at the atrocities that Hamas committed against Israeli civilians on October 7, the usual rationales for supporting Israel’s violence against Palestinians have been hard at work.

    In this election year, an additional factor looms large. With just eight months until the voting starts that could propel Donald Trump back into the presidency, the prospect of his return to power is all too real. And with Biden set to be the Democratic Party’s nominee, countless individuals and groups are careful to avoid saying much that’s critical of the president they want to see re-elected.

    Instead of candor, the routine choices have been euphemisms and silence. But—morally and politically—that’s a big mistake.

    The electoral base that Biden is going to need for re-election is heavily against his support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Polling shows that young people in particular are overwhelmingly opposed. Most have seen through the thin veneer of his weak pleas for Israel to not kill so many civilians.

    No amount of evasions, silences or doubletalk can make Biden’s policies morally acceptable. But—while the administration combines its PR hand-wringing with military arms-supplying—Biden apologists go on and on with evasion and verbal gymnastics to defend the indefensible.

    A far better course of action would be actual candor about current realities: Joe Biden’s moral collapse is enabling the Israeli government to continue, with impunity, its large-scale massacre of Palestinian people. In the process, Biden is increasing the chances that the Republican Party, led by fascistic Donald Trump, will gain control of the White House in January.

    Original article by NORMAN SOLOMON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    Comment by dizzy: Depose senile cnut Genocide Joe.