In Occupied Palestine
Zionism in practice
Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Land
08:00, 06 April until 08:00, 07 April 2024
[Source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group]
Air strikes: Heavy aerial bombardment on buildings, homes and many facilities.
Attacks: All over Gaza, there are air strikes, heavy gunfire, tank and artillery shelling, as well as missiles fired from Israeli forces and military occupation, especially in Khan Yunis. The Israeli Navycontinues to fire missiles, targeting facilities and buildings along the shoreline of the whole of Gaza.
Victims: 38 people killed in Gaza brings the total number of deaths since 7 October to at least 33,175. With another 71 wounded, that figure has risen to 75,886. Fully accurate statistics are not available, due to insecurity menacing hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
OCHA Flash Update #151 Not yet available
Epidemiologists warn if the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues,
death toll could exceed 100,000
There is no water for bathing, not even for brushing teeth
On average, there is one toilet for every 400 people.
Haaretz 6 April 2024 | Neta Ahituv
“The most troubling thing at the moment is the famine. If the amount of food entering the Gaza Strip remains as it is, and does not increase significantly in the coming days, we will reach catastrophic levels of starvation. I have been studying humanitarian crises for 20 years, and I have never seen such rates of starvation. I also worked in Somalia, and the daily caloric intake per person in Gaza is currently below the minimum during the worst days of the Somali famine. It must be understood: The amount of food currently entering Gaza is insufficient for human survival. Our data shows this, and the first cases of death by starvation are already being recorded in the field as well.”
In a recent interview with Haaretz, Francesco Checchi, professor of epidemiology and international health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, summed up the dire, and constantly worsening, situation in Gaza since the war broke out on October 7. In recent weeks, Checchi has teamed up with Dr. Paul B. Spiegel, director of the Center of Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to head a group of epidemiologists who are training a spotlight on excess mortality in Gaza – that is, deaths that would not have occurred were it not for the war. According to the complex projective model they have drawn up, even if the war that broke out after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel‘s south were to end tomorrow, and residents of Gaza were to receive “far increased humanitarian access and mobility,” 6,500 excess deaths would still likely occur over the next six months, as a result of untreated wartime injuries, infectious diseases, which are exacerbated by famine, and by lack of medical care for people suffering from chronic illness. Together with the estimated 32,500 Palestinians killed to date and 5,000 or so who are missing and presumably buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings, the researchers assess that the war will not end with fewer than 44,000 victims.
However, the report the Checchi-Spiegel team publicised last month, entitled “Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-Based Health Impact Projections,” presents a model based on two other scenarios that would impact excess mortality: In the event of both a military escalation – presumably including Israel’s anticipated invasion of Rafah – and epidemics breaking out in the Strip, over 85,000 excess deaths can be expected, for a total death toll exceeding 120,000. However, even if the situation from October and through mid-January continues, without the incursion or outbreak of epidemics, the model projects 58,000 excess deaths through early August, which would lead to 100,000 victims in total.
On August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. According to conservative estimates by researchers at Yale University, as part of “The Avalon Projects: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy,” some 39,000 people died immediately. Other scholars estimated the total death toll following the explosion and its immediate aftermath at between 60,000 and 80,000. When Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in November that he did not rule out dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, the statement stirred outrage – even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to condemn it, saying the remarks were divorced from reality. But after six months of war, when fatalities in Gaza keep mounting, perhaps those numbers are not so far from reality.
Although data on fatalities is supplied by the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry in the Strip, Israeli officials cite similar numbers. Netanyahu himself recently estimated that 13,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed so far, and that the ratio is between one and 1.5 non-combatants killed for every terrorist who is killed. That works out to 26,000-32,500 civilian deaths so far.
Hamas has reported that some 8,500 Palestinians are missing in Gaza, noting that this is a very conservative estimate. For its part, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which conducts its own monitoring based on reports from relatives, cites 5,118 missing persons as of early March.
For instance in November, a man named Omar al-Darawi lost 32 relatives and neighbours in the collapse of two four-story apartment buildings in downtown Gaza City. He survived but reported that 45 people lived in the buildings; 13 survived and 27 bodies were recovered from the ruins. The remaining five are missing and also thought to be in the rubble. The Darawi family’s story has attracted much media attention.
The estimated numbers of missing Palestinians are not always mentioned by Israeli officials along with the death toll, and the phenomenon of excess mortality as a result of the humanitarian crisis and the collapse of health-related and other public institutions in Gaza to date is not factored in at all, according to Prof. Checchi. The figures that emerge from the model devised by his team must be taken into account, he stresses.
“The amount of data we entered into the system is enormous,” he says in a phone interview with Haaretz. “It starts with data on mortality in Gaza before October 7, which formed a baseline, and to this we added various recent data such as the availability of water and food, overcrowding in the southern Strip [as a result of displacement from the north and centre, due to the fighting], how many health services are still functioning, the supply of oxygen currently available in Gaza for medical treatment and much more. The scenarios were created from this data.”
According to the team’s research, the most common cause of excess mortality in the Strip is traumatic injury as a result of the bombardments. There are currently some 74,000 wounded people in Gaza, who receive very partial medical care at best. During the war, 36 hospitals and another 100 clinics and other medical institutions have been damaged, such that there is an acute shortage of beds, equipment and medication, not to mention medical professionals.
Dr Ghassan Abu-Sitta – a Kuwaiti-born plastic and reconstructive surgeon who left his practice in London and treated civilian casualties in Gaza, beginning on October 9, for 40 days – has described in social media posts and media interviews how he and his colleagues had to perform amputations of limbs under horrific conditions. As he told the Associated Press: “The worst thing was initially the running out of morphine and proper strong analgesics and then later on running out of anesthetic medication, which meant that you would have to do painful procedures with no anesthetic.”
As these lines are being written, according to a report by the World Health Organisation, 8,000 Gazans are on a waiting list to leave the Strip in order to receive urgent medical treatment in other countries, such as Turkey or Italy. Egypt has declared that it allows passage from Gaza into its territory, via the Rafah crossing, only to individuals whose departure has been approved by both Egyptian and Israeli authorities – an average of 22 people a day until now. For its part, the Israel Defence Forces claims that the Rafah crossing is under Egyptian sovereignty, and that the matter is not subject to Israel’s discretion.
The second-most common cause of excess deaths is infectious diseases in the Strip. A February 19 report by the Global Nutrition Cluster, cited by the WHO, among others, noted that 70 percent of children under age 5 had diarrhoea in the preceding two weeks – a 23-fold increase as compared to a 2022 baseline – which puts them at risk of dehydration and death. The report by Global Nutrition Cluster, whose partners include various United Nations organisations, added that at least 90 per cent of children under 5 are suffering from one or more infectious diseases. A growing incidence of acute respiratory infections, chicken pox, skin diseases and urinary tract infections have also been reported in the Strip.
Juliette Touma, director of communications of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinians, visited Gaza twice since the war broke out. Speaking to Haaretz from Jordan, she says the main problem in the tent camps for internally displaced residents of the Strip is the poor sanitation. “There is no water for bathing, not even for brushing teeth, there is no soap. People stay for weeks in the same clothes, so we see a high incidence of scabies, lice, colds and diarrhoea. On average, there is one toilet for every 400 people.”
Prof. Checchi points out that before the war there was a high rate of inoculation among Gazans, especially children, against certain infectious diseases. That is the reason, “why diseases like cholera, which are typical of humanitarian crises, have not yet been recorded in Gaza,” he says. “However, we know from our epidemiological experience that cholera finds its way into every humanitarian crisis, and if it reaches Gaza, it will cause thousands of deaths. The three most threatening plagues after it are measles, polio and respiratory diseases.”
He adds: “Many of the epidemics are diseases that healthy children are able to recover from, but when a child is starving, their immune system does not function well, and then there is a real risk to their life.”
There are estimates of more than 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and over 90 percent of them and of breast-feeding women as well, face severe food insecurity.
In January, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, said in a CNN interview “Every single person in Gaza is hungry, one-quarter of the population is and famine is imminent.” Gaza’s Health Ministry reported recently that 27 people – among them 23 children – are known to have died from malnutrition in hospitals in the northern Strip. According to the Global Nutrition Cluster report, nutrition screenings conducted in January at shelters and health centers there found that 15.6 percent of children under age 2 – one out of six – are acutely malnourished. Moreover, there are estimates of more than 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, and over 90 percent of them and of breastfeeding women as well, face severe food insecurity, eating two or fewer food groups each day.
For her part, Touma says famine is rampant throughout the Strip. “I met a family of 21 people, living in a tent, who for two days survived on a single eggplant. In the north of the Gaza Strip, people don’t even have flour. It’s hard to find fruits, vegetables and dairy products, and eggs are hard to find, and sell for 10 shekels [about $2.75] each.”
This week, a tragedy involving supplies of desperately needed humanitarian aid occurred when seven employees of the World Central Kitchen – a non–governmental organisation that prepares and provides food for victims of war around the globe – were killed by an Israeli air strike on their convoy in Gaza.
On March 8, when activists from the Jewish-Arab organisation Standing Together asked to deliver a shipment of food to Gazans, they were stopped by soldiers about three kilometres away from the border crossing.
“There are many Israelis, Arabs and Jews alike, who oppose the deliberate starvation of the Gazans,” says the organisation’s co-director Rula Daood. “In one day we collected a ton of food, donated by private individuals: legumes, rice, wheat, flour, sugar, salt, dates and canned goods. We loaded everything onto a truck and left in a convoy with 25 cars of people who wanted to help. The soldiers stopped us and ordered us to leave within three minutes, [saying that] if not, they would use violence, arrest us and tow away all the cars – at our expense. We had to go back the way we came.” The High Court of Justice is now reviewing a petition submitted by five Israeli human rights groups demanding that they be allowed to bring aid into Gaza.
The prohibition on Israeli groups supplying humanitarian assistance to Gaza applies not only to foodstuffs but also to medical aid. When local organisations recently sought to deliver medication to Gaza, they encountered an unexpected obstacle: Israeli banks threatened to freeze their accounts. Such was the case also with Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, which in normal times brings medical equipment into the Strip and hoped to continue to do so through the humanitarian corridor established between Egypt and the Strip. However, Bank Hapoalim, where the organisation’s account is, would not allow it. Other groups have faced the same problem, at other banks.
“We acted in full co-ordination with the relevant parties in the army,” says Guy Shalev, executive director of PHR. “This is something we have been doing routinely for years, but the bank refused to transfer the payment to the pharmaceutical company.”
This shortage of medication in Gaza is generally exhausting a high cost in human lives, according to Prof. Checchi. Indeed, the third cause of excess mortality there is lack of treatment for people suffering from chronic diseases, such as those affecting the heart and the kidneys, as well as diabetes and some cancers. About 2,000 cancer patients are registered in Gaza, according to health officials there, 122 of them children. Before the war, some travelled to Israel or to the West Bank for lifesaving treatment. Others were treated at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, south of Gaza City, the only facility specialising in cancer care in the Strip. The hospital was damaged following Israeli air strikes on October 30 and eventually destroyed after the Israeli military discovered a huge system of tunnels underneath it, linking the northern and southern parts of the Strip.
One of the few hospitals in the Strip that is still functioning is the European Hospital, near Khan Yunis. International Red Cross Health Coordinator Eve Charbonneau, who recently visited Gaza, told Haaretz that she saw “large crowds of people living inside the hospital and the rooms. I have been on many missions in difficult places, and I have never seen anything like this in my life.”
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit provided this response to Haaretz: “Hamas is placing itself in the heart of [Gaza’s] civilian population, in hospitals and medical institutions, and is exploiting the special protection international law grants [these institutions], to carry out military activities from within them. Since the beginning of the war, 16,500 trucks containing 19,000 tons of medical equipment have entered Gaza, including drugs for cancer patients, insulin pens, anaesthetics, X-ray machines, computerised tomography machines and oxygen generators. The IDF works in co–ordination with aid organisations in Gaza to help co–ordinate transportation of the sick and wounded within the Strip, and in the course of the war, six field hospitals have been established to provide an additional medical response.”
West Bank
[Palestinian Monitoring Group]
Israeli Army attack – 1 wounded – 1 taken prisoner: Ramallah – 02:50–07:15, Israeli Occupation forces, firing live ammunition, wounded one person, Bashar Jamal Kamal Wehbe, and tookprisoner another.
Israeli Army attack – 1 child wounded: Jenin – 20:50, Israeli forces, firing live ammunition, wounded a 15- year-old boy, Muhammad Bassem Suleiman Amarneh, during an invasion into Ya’bad.
Israeli Army attack – 1 wounded: Hebron – 02:35, the Israeli Army opened fire on, and wounded, one person in a vehicle, near the Beit Einoun roundabout.
Israeli Army – abduction: Jerusalem – 17:40, Israeli Occupation forces, in the city, abducted a 17-year-old youth: Omar Ashraf Al-Titi.
Israeli Army – beating: Nablus – Israeli forces, at the al-Muraba’a checkpoint near Tal village, after inflicting head and eye injuries, severely beat up and hospitalised one person.
Raid: Jenin – 12:40–15:20, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the village of Fahma.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Jenin – 03:55, Israeli forces raided the village of al-Jalameh, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Jenin – dawn, the Israeli Army raided the village of Beit Qad, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Tubas – 12:40, Israeli troops raided the village of Bardala, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – abduction: Tulkarem – 18:40-21:15, the Israeli military raided the village of Izbit Shufa and abducted a 17-year-old youth: Ahmed Salah Khalil Yaqoub.
Raid: Qalqiliya – 22:25, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Hajjah village.
Raid: Qalqiliya – 23:15, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled Azzun.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner in refugee camp: Nablus – 10:00, the Israeli Army raided the Balata refugee camp, taking prisoner two people.
Raid – abduction: Nablus – 13:20-16:55, Israeli troops raided the village of Osirin and abducted a 17-year-old youth: Abdul Hadi Nabil Saleh Adili.
Raid: Nablus – dawn, the Israeli military raided and patrolled the city.
Raids – including on refugee camp: Bethlehem – 13:40, Israeli soldiers raided Bethlehem and Beit Jallah as well as the Dheisheh refugee camp.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Bethlehem – 00:10–02:15, Israeli Occupation forces raided al-Ubeidiya, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Hebron – 09:05, Israeli forces raided Dura, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Hebron – 01:35, the Israeli Army raided Beit Ummar, taking prisoner two people.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Hebron – 02:30, Israeli troops raided Idhna, taking prisoner one person.
Raid – 1 taken prisoner: Hebron – 04:35, the Israeli military raided Yatta, taking prisoner one person.
YAWN!