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.
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