Oxfam Australia Media Release
Deadly diseases are now ripping through Gaza even as millions of dollars’ worth of humanitarian aid piles up in warehouses across the region, says Oxfam.
Water-borne diseases that are both preventable and readily treatable have increased by almost 150% inside Gaza over the past three months as Israel continues to deliberately block aid.
Available multi-agency health data shows that the numbers of Palestinians presenting to health facilities with acute watery diarrhea have increased by 150 per cent, bloody diarrhea by 302 per cent, and acute jaundice cases by 101 per cent.
Even these figures will be grossly under-reported because most of the two million people trapped by Israel’s continuing siege have little access to the few healthcare facilities that have managed to keep operating.
This surge of disease can quickly turn deadly especially as Palestinians living in Gaza have been deprived of enough food, water, shelter, and adequate healthcare for over 21 months. Their community and family networks have been shattered, and people made more vulnerable by repeated forced mass displacements and continuing violence.
Israel has put Gaza under a near total blockade since March 2 of this year stopping all but a trickle of aid. There are no longer any humanitarian aid reserves held by international agencies inside of Gaza.
As a result, international humanitarian donors and agencies have been forced to accumulate more than 420,000 pallets of aid that now sit in limbo inside warehouses across the regions. This covers an area of around 75 hectares, or enough to cover 101 football fields.
This aid includes shelters, food and supplements to combat malnutrition, and water equipment, sanitation items and medicines that would be vital to tackle diseases and
Oxfam alone has over 110,000 items of humanitarian aid in one warehouse including water bladders and tanks, hygiene, dignity and water testing kits, food parcels, soap, nappies, pipes and latrine slabs.
Oxfam is waiting for clearances and permissions to enter, however the Israeli authorities have recently denied water and sanitation items and food parcels.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel policy lead, said that time is running out to prevent an epidemic across Gaza and the mass death that would inevitably result.
“The conditions that Palestinians in Gaza are being forced to endure have created a petri dish for disease. These are diseases that thrive where people lack water – clean or otherwise – and are stuck in over-crowded unsanitary environments with almost no food,” Khalidi said.
“There is a grim and deliberate inevitability as to what Israel has created in Gaza. Each day that its siege continues and it denies aid, starvation becomes increasingly widespread and human deaths from entirely preventable diseases becomes an absolute certainty.”
“As Gaza bakes in the summer sun and the hottest month of the year looms, it is increasingly urgent that Israel’s siege must end. It is shameful Israel has been allowed to besiege Gaza and create this catastrophe. Nothing other than complete access to Gaza to deliver aid at scale can alleviate the conditions that people have been forced to live in.”
“Each day we wait for a ceasefire, more lives are lost through violence, hunger and disease. Palestinians in Gaza cannot wait a day longer for this hell to end. There must be a full and complete ceasefire, and all required aid must be able to enter via all crossings into Gaza so that Palestinians can finally begin to recover and rebuild.”
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Israel, via Netanyahu, has recreated the Warsaw Ghetto right on their front doorstep. Unbelievable for a nation that constantly refers to the Holocaust and what it did to Jewish people during WW2. Shameful arrogance in the extreme.
The world’s humanity is perilously threatened by the inaction of world leaders to punish the vile barbaric actions of Zionist Israel. Stepping back to the values and principles of the Dark Ages will be the unforeseen outcomes of inaction.
Israel is doing to the children and people of Gaza what Nazi Germany did to Jewish people, just a different method, mass starvation as a weapon of war and genocide, senseless indiscriminate deliberate targeting and bombing of civilians, and mass destruction of critical living infrastructure. One thing is quite different – The Nazi regime did it in secret from the world outside its borders, while Israel attempts to do the same, the world has seen and known it right from the start, so no not quite the same as the Holocaust. But in this respect arguably far worse. As far as the outcome is concerned, it is the very same horrific result, the Nazi regime got away with it for 5 years, the Israel regime is only 18 months in and already mass deaths, with an entire population of 2.4 million now clearly on the brink.
If you are just one starving child on the brink of death it is the same suffering as the Holocaust, same result and we are talking of tens of thousands, and many more teetering.
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/1495297078304401
When Belsen was liberated by the British forces in 1945 harrowing graphic photographs of skeletal, mortally ill people were taken which bear remarkable resemblance to the photographic evidence of death from disease and starvation, which we see coming from Gaza now. The only difference between the two obscene illustrations of what cruelty man is capable of, is that Belsen was a well kept secret and the images from Gaza are being shown to the world – as if they were of little significance.
The Israeli government shames the memory of the Holocaust , of the deaths and the survivors of such vileness in its systematic degrading and depersonalising of innocent human beings in its every action today.
Starvation and disease is cheaper than bombs and bullets.
Slower, but. They want that real estate clear ASAP.