Polio in Gaza – Necropolitics of Genocide and Impending Public Health Crisis
No area is safe in the Gaza Strip and no one is safe in the Gaza Strip; this is the necropolitics of Genocide.
By Parth Sharma
Since October 7, 2023, most of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals and healthcare systems have been bombed or besieged by the apartheid State of Israel, leaving the Gaza Strip in a looming uncertainty of the mass casualties to come and the impending public health crisis.
On July 16, 2024 the Ministry of Health of Gaza announced the dreadful news that poliovirus had been detected in the six wastewater samples from late June in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. On July 23, 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that there was a high risk of the poliovirus spreading across and beyond the Gaza Strip due to the dire state of water sanitation in the region. While no human cases of the virus have yet been identified, what is clear is that the destruction of almost all functioning healthcare systems in Gaza has rendered the existing medical staff resourceless in the upcoming threat of a public health crisis.
The resurgence of the poliovirus is directly related to the genocidal campaign of the state of Israel. Since October 7, over 70% of the water and sanitation facilities in Gaza have been significantly damaged with the UN Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Cluster estimating about 340,000 tons of solid waste to have accumulated inside or near populated areas.
It is important to note that the poliovirus is transmitted through the “fecal-oral” pathway, either by direct contact with the feces of an infected child or through the consumption of water or food contaminated by the faecal matter. With nearly 2 million Palestinians (the majority of whom are children and adolescents) forcibly displaced into small areas and unhygienic refugee establishments in Gaza, there is limited access to clean water and sanitation. In June, Oxfam estimated a single toilet for every four thousand people in a supposedly ‘safe zone’ in Al-Mawasi (west of Khan Younis which was recently under Israeli attack).
With the Israeli soldiers occupying the Gaza Strip soon to be vaccinated against the poliovirus, the message is clear, this is a health crisis that the State of Israel anticipated as a direct outcome of their genocidal campaign in the region. Weaponizing health as a variable is nothing new to the settler colonial state, in fact, the targeting of healthcare systems moves beyond plain human rights violations to uncover deeper settler colonial power structures interlinked to the concept of necropolitics where an out-group which in all social locations is rendered as the inferior is then easy to kill- because some lives are less important than others.
The very blockage of aid into Gaza continues to further incapacitate the healthcare system as relentless attacks further the risk of disease. In November 2023, the WHO reported a stark increase in the cases of diarrhea noting a very serious signal around acute jaundice syndrome in the enclave. The risk of disease was disproportionately affecting infants and children in November 2023, as it continues to do now in July 2024.
When governments operate through this lens of managing and regulating the bodies within the state, it gives rise to a necropolitical premeditated strategy of war, which determines who lives and who is killed. With the targeted dismantling of healthcare systems in the Gaza Strip, the control over clean water and increasing sewage– the impact of this necropolitical paradigm will continue long after the genocide is over. Forcibly displaced Palestinians no longer have adequate places for treatment, hospitals don’t have the capacity to conduct testing and the risk of communicable and non-communicable diseases increases day after day.
In addition to the direct wounding of the body, the malnutrition, forced starvation and forced displacement, this assault is creating conditions of I can only describe as a ‘mental health emergency’, a scenario of a public health crisis where all Palestinians are at the imminent threat of developing psychosocial disabilities. Trauma actively arises from grieving the loss of their homes and livelihood while witnessing the effects of displacement, shredded limbs of their family, open skulls of their children and a forced famine in an unhygienic refugee camp. Psychosocial Disabilities which will last for generations to come reinforce the belief that there is no post-traumatic time period in Gaza.
While Benjamin Netanyahu is applauded by the American Congress on his efforts to make a “de-radicalized post-war Gaza”, wastewater is predicted to flood roads in Deir al-Balah with the fate of nearly a million Palestinians who have survived the genocide and relocated to safety now at the hands of a grim medical reality and a premeditated public health crisis.
No area is safe in the Gaza Strip and no one is safe in the Gaza Strip; this is the necropolitics of Genocide.
– Parth Sharma is a Decolonial writer, Social Justice Researcher and Trauma Therapist from India. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.