… on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing

Tag: hospitals

  • Israel’s latest massacres have exacerbated the crisis in Gaza’s healthcare facilities

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    Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    Al Shifa Hospital after a two-week Israeli siege, April 2024.

    Gaza’s hospitals, already overwhelmed, are struggling with an influx of casualties following brutal attacks on refugee camps. Sugary drinks have become the most affordable food as aid delivery obstructions persist

    Brutal attacks by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have, yet again, intensified pressure on the few functional hospitals in the Gaza Strip. Health workers at Nasser Medical Complex reported harrowing scenes following attacks on Khan Younis on July 13, where they received over 100 new casualties despite the hospital already operating over capacity.

    “At one point, you had people in the hallway moaning in pain,” said Amy Kit-Mei Low, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) project medical referent. “Even though they had [wound] dressings, the dressings were oozing blood. […] the hospital was trying to cope, but it can barely cope with normal cases.”

    UNRWA representative Scott Anderson described the scene at the hospital, stressing the lack of beds, disinfectants, and electricity to run ventilation at Nasser. “I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralyzed and unable to receive treatment, and others separated from their parents. I also saw mothers and fathers who were unsure if their children were alive,” Anderson said.

    In addition to the relentless IOF attacks, including those targeting healthcare facilities that have killed 2.5% of Gaza’s health workforce since October 7, hospitals are also struggling with aid delivery restrictions imposed by Israel. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza, and especially since the beginning of May, the flow of essential goods to hospitals has been drastically reduced. Hospitals are particularly burdened by the ban on certain medications, including anesthetics, strong painkillers, and even diabetes drugs. Recently, a consortium of organizations providing health care in Gaza warned of a shortage of antibiotics safe for pregnant and breastfeeding women due to the blockade.

    Read more: Israel continues its efforts to undermine UNRWA

    Despite having hundreds of kilos of aid ready for dispatch, supplies are blocked from reaching hospitals and health centers. The blockade is reinforcing severe food shortages, exacerbating the health crisis. Reports indicate that Israel prioritizes commercial trucks over humanitarian ones at crossings, leaving people with limited and extremely expensive food options. The same consortium of organizations reported that sugary drinks are currently the most affordable food in Gaza.

    Famine is spreading rapidly across all regions of Gaza. Nearly 10,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are on the verge of famine, and 7,000 are already living in famine conditions, according to the United Nations. As a result, more babies are being born preterm and underweight.

    Read more: UN experts say, there is already famine in Gaza

    For older children, mental health persists as a critical issue. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP) recently estimated that half a million children in Gaza require mental health support. Displaced families report that children are struggling with bedwetting, continuous shaking, violent outbursts, and likely PTSD due to living under constant attack.

    GCMHP warns that mental health is also deteriorating among adults, as needs in Gaza far exceed available services. Many people are becoming emotionally numb as a consequence of not being able to receive any mental health support, and are disillusioned by the international community’s failure to halt the genocide perpetrated by Israel. GCMHP teams have encountered people in a state of emotional stagnation, recounting the loss of entire families as if it were a routine event. While scaling up mental health services is crucial for addressing this, GCMHP and other organizations insist that this will not be enough without a ceasefire.

    ​​People’s Health Dispatch is a fortnightly bulletin published by the People’s Health Movement and Peoples Dispatch. For more articles and to subscribe to People’s Health Dispatch, click here.

    Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

  • Israeli Military Has Killed 500 Gaza Healthcare Workers—Two a Day Since Assault Began

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    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

    Mourners carry the body of Palestinian doctor Hani al-Jaafarawi, Gaza’s ambulance and emergency teams chief, during his funeral in Gaza City, Gaza on June 24, 2024. (Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

    “This cannot be allowed to continue any longer,” said one advocate. “Every potential serious violation must be independently investigated and those responsible brought to justice.”

    Doctors and humanitarian organizations demanded international investigations and action on Wednesday after the United Nations announced that Israel’s military has now killed 500 healthcare workers in Gaza—roughly two per day on average—during its nearly nine-month assault on the besieged Palestinian enclave.

    The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement Tuesday that Israeli forces’ killing of hundreds of healthcare workers has “occurred against the backdrop of systematic attacks on hospitals and other medical facilities in violation of the laws of war.” The World Health Organization has documented more than 460 attacks on healthcare workers and infrastructure in Gaza since October 7.

    “The latest health worker reportedly killed was Mr. Hani Al Ja’afarwi, head of Emergency and Ambulance Services at a health clinic in Gaza City on 23 June 2024,” said the U.N. Human Rights Office. “Many health workers have also died with their family members when residential buildings were struck by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”

    The U.N.’s latest tally did not include Fadi Al-Wadiya, a 33-year-old Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) staffer who was killed along with five other people Tuesday in an attack in Gaza City. MSF did not explicitly assign blame for the attack, which the group described as “yet another brutal example of the senseless killing of Palestinian civilians and healthcare workers in Gaza.”

    Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said Wednesday that “hospitals, medical staff, and civilians all have protected status under international law, law that the Israel military has flagrantly ignored every day through its repeated targeting of healthcare facilities and staff.”

    “Though now happening at an unprecedented rate in Gaza, attacks on Palestinian healthcare by the Israeli military have recurred over many years, ever-worsening because of chronic impunity,” said Talbot. “This cannot be allowed to continue any longer. Every potential serious violation must be independently investigated and those responsible brought to justice.”

    Not a single hospital is fully functioning in the Gaza Strip after months of relentless Israeli bombing, and medical workers have been forced to treat airstrike victims and other patients in overwhelmed facilities without necessary equipment and medications, including anesthesia.

    As Israel’s blockade leaves the occupied territory’s population without sufficient access to clean water and other essentials, infectious diseases have been spreading rapidly as the health crisis spirals out of control, starvation proliferates, and the death toll mounts.

    “Systematic attacks on healthcare by Israeli forces are exacerbating the worst humanitarian crisis ever seen in Gaza,” MAP said Wednesday. “More than 37,000 Palestinians have been killed and at least 86,000 injured since Israel’s assault began, with an estimated 10,000 still trapped under rubble, most presumed dead. Instead of being able to safely provide medical care for those in urgent need, Palestinian healthcare workers have themselves come under both indiscriminate and apparent targeted attack by the Israeli military.”

    Tanya Haj-Hassan, a doctor who volunteered in a hospital with MAP earlier this year, said that “Palestinian healthcare workers have told me that when they leave the hospital, civilians give them civilian clothing because wearing scrubs is putting a target sticker on their back.”

    “This is how systematically healthcare has been targeted in Gaza,” Haj-Hassan added.

    Haider Al-Qudra, executive director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Gaza, told MAP that “as long as the international community does not take any measures against Israeli forces that continue to violate international humanitarian law, we will lose more personnel working to meet the health and humanitarian needs of citizens on the frontline.”

    “Because of this systematic targeting from Israeli forces,” said Al-Qudra, “34 PRCS staff have lost their lives, most of them emergency medical services staff, including 19 while they tried to respond to emergency calls from citizens.”

    Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

    The Gaza Project Exposes Israel’s ‘Chilling Pattern’ of Killing Journalists

    Aid Group Warns New UN Figures Show ‘Hunger Catastrophe’ for Gaza Children

    Over 20,000 Children Missing in Gaza, With ‘Unknown Number’ in Mass Graves: Report

    Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted "I support Zionism without qualification." He's asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
    Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.

  • Morning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

    The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.

    And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility.

    In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service.

    That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.

    But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.

    Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).

    …

    Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.

    To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it

  • Elites in the global North are scared to talk about Palestine

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

    FREE SPEECH NATION? Arrests are made as pro-Palestinian students and protesters are pushed off campus at the University of Texas, Wednesday April 24

    While people across the world have been taking bold action in support of Palestine, the global North ruling class has used all tools at its disposal to support Israel’s genocide and criminalise solidarity writes VIJAY PRASHAD

    ISRAELI BOMBS continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al-Jazeera published a story about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza.

    The former UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, Andrew Gilmour, told BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”

    Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch shows that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts.

    Yet, these facts — according to a leaked memorandum — cannot be spoken about in the “newspaper of record” in the US, the New York Times. Journalists at the paper were asked to avoid the terms “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory.”

    Indeed, over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about the genocidal violence using passive voice: bombs fell, people died.

    Even on social media, where the terrain is often less controlled, the axe fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonisation” and phrases such as “From the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/elites-global-north-are-scared-talk-about-palestine

  • UN appeals for £2.2bn for Gaza to help Palestinians in desperate need of food and other aid

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/un-appeals-ps22bn-gaza-help-palestinians-desperate-need-food-and-other-aid

    THE United Nations has appealed for $2.8 billion (£2.2bn) to provide desperately needed aid to three million Palestinians, stressing that tackling looming famine in the devastated Gaza Strip requires not only food but sanitation, water and health facilities.

    Andrea De Domenico, the head of the UN humanitarian office for Gaza and the West Bank, told reporters on Tuesday night that massive operations are required to restore those services and meet minimum standards — and this can’t be done during military operations.

    He pointed to the destruction of hospitals, water and sanitation facilities, homes, roads and schools by Israeli forces, adding that “there is not a single university that is standing in Gaza.”

    Mr De Domenico said Israel’s recently ended so-called military operation at Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical facility, was so destructive the facility has been forced to shut down.

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/un-appeals-ps22bn-gaza-help-palestinians-desperate-need-food-and-other-aid