Children in Gaza Now Threatened with Polio

While negotiations on a possible ceasefire in Gaza drag on in Doha, with the Biden Administration desperate to achieve some kind of face-saving compromise for internal political reasons, the Palestinian population continues to suffer and die. Beyond a few crocodile tears, European nations have remained shamefully silent in front of the genocide.

According to a letter published in the authoritative British medical journal The Lancet on July 5, a new study has found that as many as 186,000 Palestinians have died since Oct. 7, 2023, applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every death directly due to the Israeli bombings and combat. The spread of epidemics and disease, amid the total breakdown of any health system, is a major cause of mortality.

Even polio has once again become a very real threat, especially among young children. The World Health Organization and UNICEF are gearing up for a vaccination campaign but need minimally a 7-day pause in the fighting in order to carry it out.

According to a new UN estimate, reported by Bloomberg News last week, Gaza is now buried under some 42 million tons of rubble. More than 70% of the housing, schools and hospitals in the Strip, has been damaged by the Israeli military campaign. Most of the population has been displaced, forced to live in overcrowded, unsanitary refugee camps, where they are not even safe from Israeli tanks and bombs. The area around Khan Younis, which once produced most of Gaza’s citrus fruit, including oranges and grapefruits, now lies under an estimated 8.5 million tons of debris. At least half of the Strip’s farmland has been destroyed, leading to a collapse of the agricultural sector that will take years to overcome, according to Juzoor, a local charity partnered with Oxfam.

The reconstruction of Gaza is reportedly on the agenda in Doha, at least formally. But given the utter destruction and the deep-rooted mistrust built up on both sides, nothing less than a completely new approach must be taken for the entire region, one that breaks out of the “rules of the game” of geopolitics. The Oasis Plan proposed by the Schiller Institute does just that (several videos posted here).