Over 25% of the Gazans who are displaced into the emergency tent cities are now known to have infectious diseases. The UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) identifies over 360,000 of the 1.3 million people in the shelters as suffering from various combinations of meningitis, jaundice, impetigo, chickenpox, and upper respiratory infections. There are another 900,000 Gazans not accounted for in these numbers.
Dr. Tareq Abu A’anza, a pediatrician at Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told +972 Magazine that within the remaining hospitals, gastrointestinal diseases have surged fourfold, while skin diseases have tripled. In a 24-hour period, he explained, Al-Nasser’s emergency department receives between 700 and 1,000 children suffering from various health issues, including skin rashes, meningitis, epidemic hepatitis, respiratory distress, and gastrointestinal infections with severe dehydration.
Yesterday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres issued yet another warning. He posted: “Intense fighting, lack of electricity, limited fuel & disrupted telecommunications severely restrict the @UN’s concerted efforts to provide life-saving aid to people in Gaza.” he called for “conditions to allow for large-scale humanitarian operations” to be “reestablished immediately.”
Talk about pauses, truces, even ceasefires, without taking into account the completely predictable disease-vectored holocaust that’s been prepared, falls somewhere between reckless disregard and complicity in war-crimes.
