[Salon] Polio returns to Gaza - Arab Digest.org. guest post

Polio returns to Gaza Summary: a young medical student indicts Israel and its Western allies for the outbreak of polio in a war-destroyed Gaza. We thank Tharwa Boulifi for today’s newsletter. Tharwa is a 23 year-old Tunisian writer and medical student. She writes in Arabic, French, English and Spanish focussing on women’s rights with an emphasis on Arab and African women, culture and LGBTQ+ rights. Tharwa is a regular contributor to the newsletter. You can find her AD podcast Tunisia’s Gen Z here. Over the last ten months, Israel has never stopped shocking the international community with the relentless expansion of its crimes in Gaza, each one as horrifying as the other. Such uncompromising conduct falls within Israel’s plan to normalise the genocide and the crimes against humanity it has committed. It seems to have achieved its goal: the 40,738 people, including 16,500 children killed by Israel, and the 94,154 injured have become nothing more than figures. As a result, a state of collective weariness has permeated among the citizens of the world as Israel’s flagrant war crimes and the disempowering of global justice institutions continues. Although the world community has, throughout modern history, been brought to accept as a reality that politics is a dirty game, one cannot remain insensitive to the collapse of one of contemporary societies' major pillars: health. Over the past 10 months, Israel’s genocidal attacks on innocent civilians also inflicted serious damage on vital socio-economic infrastructure; only 17 of 36 hospitals in Gaza are currently partially functional. Besides, the destruction of 80% of commercial and agricultural facilities has led to a severe lack of food, causing malnutrition for 90% of Gaza’s children. In addition, Israel has done its best to prevent external aid from reaching the Strip, imposing “severe restrictions on the import of commercial goods and humanitarian supplies”, as noted by UNICEF. Amongst the critical infrastructure destroyed by the relentless attacks of the IDF are water and sewage treatment plants. As intended, the deliberate and systematic destruction of Gaza has led to even more catastrophic scenarios, like a polio outbreak after 25 years of its eradication. The virus, supposedly almost completely eradicated (type 2 was eradicated in 1999, type 3 in 2020, while type 1 remains in two countries), made a comeback in Gaza. In mid-August, a 10-month-old boy, the first detected case of polio in the Strip in this century, became partially paralysed after contracting the virus. The instances of poliovirus detected in Gaza are vaccine-derived; people who haven’t been vaccinated or who haven’t completed their vaccinations. After the first confirmed polio case in Gaza in 25 years, a massive vaccination campaign has started [photo credit: WHO] The worsening of both sanitary and health conditions is undeniably as concerning as the ongoing war that Palestinians have been enduring for almost a year now. This recurrence of a disease, for which the World Health Organisation launched an initiative to eradicate in 1988, is testimony to the decline of our modern civilisation. It discredits international political and diplomatic organisations like the UN, established by the ruling superpowers after WWII, to ensure “peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet.” Failing to achieve any of these objectives, the UN has unequivocally proven to be inadequate in all respects. With 193 countries as member states, the Gaza war is witness to a failure of responsibility that is shared by all and not just the US and its Western allies who back Israel in their genocide against the Palestinian people. As a medical student, and like many others, we weren’t aware of the huge discrepancy between reality and what we’re taught in university about equal access to health being a fundamental right. The on the ground reality shows us that access to healthcare is a two-tier system where people in some parts of the world benefit from robotic surgery while others don’t have access to vaccination. What is the fault of children and newborn babies who didn’t choose to be in a war zone and if they survive are forced to grow up in such unjust times? Is there any hope for this orphaned generation of Palestinian children who have just entered life but have already borne witness to its cruelty? While the suffering of the injured is unparalleled, the suffering of those doctors and health care workers on the ground, who have the expertise to save lives, but lack the equipment to do so, is intolerable. Bearing the heavy responsibility for the health of fellow humans is hard enough in the first place. Carrying out this mission in such inhumane conditions, while constantly battling death and lacking the necessary medicines and equipment thus being forced to give up the lives of their patients, is most cruel. These heroic doctors - many of whom received on shift the news of the death of family members and had to identify their bodies - fulfil the Hippocratic oath they took when they became doctors. Today, as a medical student, I think about the multiple medical conferences, about the latest discoveries in the field taking place in Western countries, those same countries that are accomplices to the human tragedy being inflicted on Palestine. These superpowers, causing the brain drain from the same regions where they’ve been committing their crimes, keep boasting about the advances in medicine they have made. The current disaster in healthcare in Gaza is a shameful international failure for a supposedly civilised developed world. With Gaza the Global North has forgotten that the right to health and prosperity extends to all humanity.