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‘No End to Hell’: Disaster Spirals as Israeli Assault Traps 400,000 in Northern Gaza

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

A Palestinian child who was wounded in an Israeli attack on Jabalia, Gaza receives treatment on October 9, 2024. (Photo: Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“The latest move to forcefully and violently push thousands of people from northern Gaza to the south is turning the north into a lifeless desert,” warned one aid worker.

The head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday that at least 400,000 people are trapped in northern Gaza as Israeli forces ramp up their bombardment of the area, killing dozens and intensifying an already nightmarish humanitarian emergency.

“Northern Gaza: no end to hell,” Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), wrote on social media. “Recent evacuation orders from the Israeli authorities are forcing people to flee again and again, especially from Jabalia Camp. Many are refusing because they know too well that no place anywhere in Gaza is safe.”

Lazzarini said some UNRWA shelters and services in northern Gaza have been forced to shut down amid the Israeli assault “for the first time since the war began” over a year ago.

“With almost no basic supplies available, hunger is spreading and deepening again,” said Lazzarini. “This recent military operation also threatens the implementation of the second phase of the polio vaccination campaign for children. Children are as ever, the first and most to suffer. They deserve so much better, they deserve a cease-fire now, they deserve a future.”

Zero humanitarian aid has entered besieged northern Gaza in over a week, according to aid groups and the U.N., and incessant Israeli attacks have rendered the area’s hospitals largely inaccessible. Israeli forces have ordered the area’s hospitals to evacuate, endangering patients and healthcare workers.

The director of northern Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital told Drop Site on Wednesday that he is refusing to comply with Israel’s evacuation order.

“As long as there are patients, I won’t leave,” said Dr. Hossam Abu Safia. “I’ve been here since the genocide started, and I am determined to continue helping my people.”

At least dozens of people have reportedly been killed in the Israeli military’s latest assault on northern Gaza, but emergency workers on the ground have said it’s impossible to determine the true toll given Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign, which has targeted the Jabalia refugee camp and other areas in the region.

Citing Gaza’s Civil Defense, The Associated Press reported Wednesday that an Israeli airstrike “hit a family home” in the Jabalia camp, “killing at least nine people”—including two women and two children.

“Footage shared by the Civil Defense showed first responders recovering dead bodies and body parts from under the rubble,” the outlet noted.

On Monday—the one-year anniversary of the Hamas-led October 7 attack and the beginning of Israel’s devastating response—Israeli forces ordered swaths of famine-stricken northern Gaza to evacuate, instructing residents to move south to Deir Al-Balah and Al-Mawasi, badly overcrowded so-called “humanitarian zones” that the Israeli military has repeatedly bombed.

After ordering most of northern Gaza to evacuate, Israeli forces fired on Palestinians desperately trying to flee.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, said Tuesday that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is “turning the north of Gaza into an unlivable wasteland, effectively emptying out the whole north of the strip of Palestinian life.”

“The latest move to forcefully and violently push thousands of people from northern Gaza to the south is turning the north into a lifeless desert, while aggravating the situation in the south, where more than one million people have already been squeezed into a small portion of the Gaza Strip and live in deplorable conditions,” said Sarah Vuylsteke, an MSF project coordinator in Gaza.

“Access to water, healthcare, and safety is already almost nonexistent, and the thought of more people fitting into this space is impossible to imagine,” Vuylsteke added. “People have been subjected to endless displacement and relentless bombing for the past 12 months. Enough is enough, this must stop now.”

In a joint statement on Wednesday, a coalition of 18 aid groups warned that the ongoing Israeli assault “will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in the north” and has already “prevented international and national humanitarian organizations from carrying out already very limited lifesaving aid operations.”

“The new orders have obstructed humanitarian actors from providing necessities such as health services, clean water, food, and nutrition services, taking away the remaining lifelines for the civilian population,” reads the statement signed by Oxfam, ActionAid, Islamic Relief, and more than a dozen other groups.

“Nowhere in Gaza is safe for civilians,” the coalition said. “Given the severity of the needs, humanitarian actors must be able to distribute aid and continue their work, without threat of displacement or military operations. The undersigned aid organizations urge all parties to the conflict to uphold their obligations to protect civilians and facilitate unhindered humanitarian access at all times.”

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

Continue Reading‘No End to Hell’: Disaster Spirals as Israeli Assault Traps 400,000 in Northern Gaza

US Doctors Tell Biden, Harris They ‘Witnessed Crimes Beyond Comprehension’ in Gaza

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

Razan Arafat Barbah, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who lost both of her legs in an Israeli attack on her home in Rafah in southern Gaza, is treated at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis on October 1, 2024.  (Photo: Hani Alshaer/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“A cease-fire must be imposed on the warring parties by withholding military support for Israel and supporting an international arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups.”

Nearly 100 U.S. healthcare providers who have volunteered in the Gaza Strip over the past year sent President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a Wednesday letter detailing “the massive human toll from Israel’s attack” and urging the administration to “end this madness now!”

Israel has been waging war on Gaza since the Hamas-led attack that killed over 1,100 people last year. During that time, the physicians, surgeons, nurse practitioners, nurses, and midwives who signed the letter have collectively spent 254 weeks volunteering in hospitals and clinics throughout the besieged enclave.

As of Wednesday, Israeli forces have killed at least 41,689 Palestinians in Gaza and injured another 96,625, according to local officials. Thousands more remain missing in the rubble of civilian infrastructure. Israel—which also launched a ground invasion of Lebanon this week—faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.

“This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” the health workers wrote to Biden and Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee for the November election.

“Our government must act immediately to prevent an even worse catastrophe than what has already befallen the people of Gaza and Israel,” they argued. “A cease-fire must be imposed on the warring parties by withholding military support for Israel and supporting an international arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. We believe our government is obligated to do this, both under American law and international humanitarian law. We also believe it is the right thing to do.”

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”

Even before the October 7, 2023 attack, the United States had given Israel billions of dollars in annual military aid. Throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza—and now Lebanon—the Biden administration has continued to provide weapons and diplomatic support.

The American medical volunteers’ new letter—published on a website that also features a July missive along with similar ones that Canadian and U.K. health workers sent to their governments—shares accounts from individual signatories. Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, an OB-GYN, said that “I saw so many stillbirths and maternal deaths that could have been easily prevented if the hospitals had been functioning normally.”

Those who survived birth faced a warzone where thousands of children have died. Last month, Gaza’s Ministry of Health released a 649-page document with names and ages of Palestinians killed in the past year—and the first 14 pages are babies.

“Every day I saw babies die,” said Asma Taha, pediatric nurse practitioner. “They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed them, so they starved.”

Israeli bombings in the past year have claimed thousands of lives. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, said that “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.”

The letter to Biden and Harris states:

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.

President Biden and Vice President Harris, we wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned: dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them. We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget. We cannot fathom why you continue arming the country that is deliberately killing these children en masse.

“I’ve never seen such horrific injuries, on such a massive scale, with so few resources,” said Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon and the letter’s organizer. “Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands. Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty.”

The letter notes that “Israel has destroyed more than half of Gaza’s healthcare resources and has killed nearly 1,000 Palestinian healthcare workers, more than 1 out of every 20 healthcare workers in Gaza. At the same time, healthcare needs have increased massively from the lethal combination of military violence, malnutrition, disease, and displacement.”

It also challenges Israeli forces’ attempts to justify attacking the enclave’s medical infrastructure, stressing that “not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.”

“We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder,” the American volunteers wrote, describing Palestinian healthcare workers as “among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world.”

While welcoming the administration’s efforts to negotiate an end to the fighting, they emphasized that “the United States can impose a cease-fire on the warring parties by simply stopping arms shipments to Israel, and announcing that we will participate in an international arms embargo on both Israel and all Palestinian armed groups.”

“President Biden and Vice President Harris, we are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” they added. “Crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting. Please meet with us to discuss what we saw, and why we feel American policy in the Middle East must change immediately.”

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

Continue ReadingUS Doctors Tell Biden, Harris They ‘Witnessed Crimes Beyond Comprehension’ in Gaza

For-Profit US Healthcare System—Once Again—Ranks Dead Last Among Its Peers

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

Medical staffers tend to patients at a hospital in Houston, Texas on August 18, 2021. (Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

“Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less,” said one progressive activist.

A report out Thursday shows that the United States’ for-profit healthcare system still ranks dead last among peer nations on key metrics, including access to care and health outcomes such as life expectancy at birth.

The new analysis from the Commonwealth Fund is the latest indictment of a corporate-dominated system that leaves tens of millions of people uninsured or underinsured and unable to afford life-saving medications without rationing doses or going into debt.

“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents,” the report states. “Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier.”

People in the U.S., which spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other rich nations, “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths,” Commonwealth noted, pointing to frequent “denials of services by insurance companies” and other systematic defects of the American system, including massive administrative costs.

Meanwhile, insurance giants and pharmaceutical companies are raking in huge profits, benefiting in particular from the growing privatization of Medicare. More than half of the Medicare-eligible population in the U.S. is currently on a privately run Medicare Advantage plan.

“Our private, profit-driven system means that we are paying more for less,” progressive activist Jonathan Cohn wrote in response to the Commonwealth report.

Americans live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths.

Note: To normalize performance scores across countries, each score is the calculated standard deviation from a nine-country average that excludes the US. See “How We Conducted This Study” for more detail.

Data: Commonwealth Fund analysis.

Source: David Blumenthal et al., Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System — Comparing Performance in 10 Nations (Commonwealth Fund, Sept. 2024). https://doi.org/10.26099/ta0g-zp66

The Commonwealth Fund’s findings bolster progressives’ case for transitioning to a Medicare for All system that would provide comprehensive coverage to everyone in the country for free at the point of service. Studies have repeatedly shown that such a program would cost less than the immensely wasteful for-profit system—which is set to drive national healthcare spending to $7.7 trillion per year by 2032—while saving lives.

Commonwealth observed Thursday that while affordability “is a pervasive problem” in the U.S., Australia “offers free care in all public hospitals, and the nation’s universal Medicare system provides all Australians with coverage for all or part of the cost of [general practitioners] and specialist consultations and diagnostic tests, with additional subsidies available for private hospital care.”

“The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector,” the report continues. “While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.”

Americans face the most barriers to accessing and affording health care.

Note: To normalize performance scores across countries, each score is the calculated standard deviation from a nine-country average that excludes the US. See “How We Conducted This Study” for more detail.

Data: Commonwealth Fund analysis.

Source: David Blumenthal et al., Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System — Comparing Performance in 10 Nations (Commonwealth Fund, Sept. 2024). https://doi.org/10.26099/ta0g-zp66

With the U.S. presidential election less than two months away, neither 2024 candidate for the two major parties has outlined a detailed healthcare proposal thus far.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, said during last week’s debate in Philadelphia that he merely has “the concepts of a plan,” while Harris—who once co-sponsored Medicare for All legislation in the Senate—said she “absolutely” supports “private healthcare options” and wants to “maintain and grow the Affordable Care Act.”

Just days after the debate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—Trump’s running mate—said the Republican nominee prefers a system in which “a young American” and a “65-year-old American with a chronic condition” are not placed in “the same risk pools,” suggesting a rollback of the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions.

“You can’t really say people with preexisting conditions are protected if they are in a separate insurance risk pool and can be charged exorbitant premiums,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the research group KFF, wrote in response to Vance’s comments.

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

Continue ReadingFor-Profit US Healthcare System—Once Again—Ranks Dead Last Among Its Peers

‘History Is Watching’: Gaza Doctors Urge Harris to Back Israel Arms Embargo at Democratic Convention

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

An injured Palestinian baby is treated in al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after an Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 7, 2024.
 (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“We are here to deliver a policy that saves and improves lives,” Uncommitted National Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said in opening remarks at a press conference on the sidelines of the DNC.

As humanitarians opposed to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza continued to protest during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, American doctors who recently volunteered in the besieged enclave implored the party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris—based on the carnage and heartache they have witnessed—to embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.

during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Uncommitted National Movement held a Tuesday press conference at which American doctors who volunteered in Gaza implored Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, to embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.

“We are here to deliver a policy that saves and improves lives,” Uncommitted National Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said in opening remarks at Tuesday’s press conference. “We are here because we want to win a better world.”

Alawieh slammed the “hypocritical action” of Biden administration officials who, while “saying they want a cease-fire,” continue “to send more and more weapons” to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “murderous government,” which “is using those weapons to kill civilians” and is “preventing any hope for all captives, Israeli and Palestinian, to be reunited with their families.”

Such support, Alawieh added, is also “preventing any hope of a departure from the horrors that we are seeing our siblings in Gaza experience with more than 16,000 children… being killed using U.S. weapons.”

“The Uncommitted National Movement mobilized Democratic voters—more than 740,000 nationally—specifically around the idea that our candidate, regardless of who they may be, needs an updated approach to their Gaza policy,” Alawieh continued. “Specifically, our stance is that our government should embrace an arms embargo. Stop sending weapons that are being used to kill civilians.”

“Vice President Harris is engaging with us on this issue,” Alawieh added. “Her team is engaging with us on this issue. We do view that as a positive step in the right direction. We want to be very clear that what we need to see urgently is for the bombs to stop. Stop sending bombs if you want us to believe that you want a cease-fire.”

There are 30 Uncommitted delegates attending the DNC after being elected in Democratic primaries in states like Minnesota, where the movement received 18.9% of the vote, and the key swing state of Wisconsin, where it won 13.3%. As polling reveals that Democratic and Independent voters in crucial swing states would be more likely to vote for Harris if she backs an arms embargo on Israel, her campaign has made some moves to accommodate Uncommitted voices, including providing space at the DNC.

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, a Chicago-based emergency physician, said she asked Palestinians what she should tell people in the United States about Gaza, where she saw the aftermath of “massacre after massacre” and “suffering on an entirely unprecedented scale.”

“Tell the world what you saw,” she said they told her. “We cannot afford another day of this.”

On Monday, the DNC held its first-ever panel on Palestinian rights, which featured testimony from some of those who spoke at Tuesday’s press conference, including Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

On Tuesday, Haj-Hassan said that the American doctors who worked in Gaza “cannot unsee what we witnessed, it gives us nightmares.”

“I can personally testify that I have never seen anything so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane,” she stated. “We decided to come here and bear moral witness with the unfortunate recognition that the only way to protect civilian life is through putting pressure on the U.S. government to stop militarily supporting Israel in its campaign.”

Haj-Hassan continued:

For the past 10 months, we have witnessed civilian casualty after civilian massacre after civilian massacre. The bread massacre. The Nuseirat massacre. The multiple school massacres, where internally displaced people, who have been forcibly transferred, a war crime in and of itself… finally sought shelter only to be massacred. Entire families exterminated. Humanitarian workers and healthcare workers and journalists killed in record numbers. Children with their extremities amputated traumatically in record numbers…

Over 17,000 children have lost one or both parents in Gaza since October. We have treated children who are the only surviving members of their entire family who were killed in the same bombing. I have personally held the hands of children taking their last final gasps with no family alive… unable to comfort them during their final agonizing breaths… This phenomenon of children having their entire families killed and arriving to the emergency department is so frequent it actually has an acronym… wounded child, no surviving family, given the acronym WCNSF.

Children who are fortunate enough to survive their injuries are discharged into a Russian roulette of a hundred different ways that they could be killed… another bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease. Now we have alarming reports of an outbreak of polio. Polio is something that we were able to eradicate on the majority of this planet decades ago.

“And yet we continue to fund this,” Haj-Hassan added. “History is watching us. The world is watching us. I cannot make sense of this. I suspect you cannot too. And I hope that the Democratic Party recognizes the irony and the hypocrisy of what we continue to fund and chooses to finally stand by the values of human rights and justice that we claim to stand by.”

Harris has expressed sympathy for Palestinians suffering what she called a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. However, like Biden, she’s also proclaimed her “unwavering” support for Israel. When asked earlier this month if Harris would support a suspension in weapons transfers, one of her national security advisers said that “she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups” and “does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”

Human rights advocates fear that if elected to a second term, former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, would be even more supportive of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza than the Biden-Harris administration.

According to Palestinian and international officials, at least 40,173 Palestinians have been killed—most of them women and children—and nearly 93,000 others have been wounded during Israel’s 319-day assault and siege on Gaza. Gaza officials say that at least 10,000 other Palestinians are missing, believed to be dead and buried under the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings.

Almost the entire Gaza population of 2.3 million has been forcibly displaced. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving; dozens have died from malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medicines and healthcare amid a crippling Israeli siege that has been cited as evidence during Israel’s genocide trial at the International Court of Justice. The blockade has also exacerbated the spread of contagious diseases including measles, hepatitis, and polio.

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

Continue Reading‘History Is Watching’: Gaza Doctors Urge Harris to Back Israel Arms Embargo at Democratic Convention

Plight of children in Gaza ‘beyond anything I’ve ever seen before’, British nurse says

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/plight-of-children-in-gaza-beyond-anything-ive-ever-seen-before-british-nurse-says

Screen grab from PA video of Becky Platt, a British paediatric nurse who provided aid for children with shattered and amputated limbs from airstrikes in Gaza described what she encountered as “beyond anything I’ve ever seen before”, August 2, 2024.

A BRITISH nurse has described the plight of children in Gaza as “beyond anything I’ve ever seen before.”

Becky Platt, 50, treated youngsters with shattered and amputated limbs from Israeli bombing raids at a Gaza hospital in April.

She described the healthcare situation as broken and in dire need for medicine and other aid.

“When I first arrived, I remember seeing small children and toddlers picking through rubbish in the middle of the road, unaccompanied children, picking up things and eating [them],” she said.

“Multiple children had spinal injuries or pelvic injuries, which meant that they were unable to walk, and may always be unable to walk.

“These are children that have had their limbs blown off and what we’ve got to offer them is paracetamol and ibuprofen because all of the supply chains have broken down, and it’s really difficult to get hold of anything stronger than that.

“In addition to that, there are multiple children, thousands affected by all of the problems that are associated with living in poor hygiene conditions and overcrowded areas.”

The advanced clinical practitioner at a London paediatric A&E, who visited the hospital for charity Save the Children, told of how children couldn’t look at their amputated limbs and how one boy “who had his femur shattered when he was near where a bomb landed when he was playing with his friends — he lost his six best friends, and he dreams about those boys every single night.

“When he closes his eyes, they’re there — that kind of psychological distress is something that maybe they’ll never get over.

“They need significant help with that and they need it urgently. There’s an absolute dire need for aid at the moment.”

More than 20,000 children are estimated to be lost, disappeared, detained or buried under rubble, according to recent analysis from Save the Children.

Liz Bradshaw, senior conflict and humanitarian adviser at Save the Children UK, said: “Becky’s experiences in Gaza highlight the critical need for immediate action.

“We urge the international community to support our efforts and provide the necessary resources to help children enduring horrific violence from the ongoing Israeli bombardment.

“The world cannot keep standing by as these children suffer. An immediate and definitive ceasefire is the only way to save lives in Gaza and end grave and serious violations of their rights.”

“In addition to that, there are multiple children, thousands affected by all of the problems that are associated with living in poor hygiene conditions and overcrowded areas.”

…

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/plight-of-children-in-gaza-beyond-anything-ive-ever-seen-before-british-nurse-says

Continue ReadingPlight of children in Gaza ‘beyond anything I’ve ever seen before’, British nurse says