Unsilencing Gaza by Sara Roy

Unsilencing Gaza by Sara Roy

Author:Sara Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press


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* Originally published in Counterpunch, June 4, 2019.

20

Tears of Salt: A Brief Reflection on Israel, Palestine and the Coronavirus*

On March 26, 2020, Israeli civil administration officials arrived in Khirbet Ibziq, a Palestinian community in the West Bank. They were there to prevent the construction of a field clinic (among other structures) during the Covid-19 pandemic that emerged in the West Bank just three weeks before. According to the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, “[The civil administration] confiscated poles and sheeting that were meant to form eight tents, two for a field clinic, and four for emergency housing for residents evacuated from their homes, and two as makeshift mosques.”1 In addition, the Israeli authorities closed a coronavirus testing clinic in East Jerusalem because the testing kits were supplied by the Palestinian Authority, which is not allowed to operate in Jerusalem.2 On July 22, 2020, “Israeli forces demolished … a Covid-19 testing clinic in the city of Hebron, the epicenter of the outbreak in the occupied West Bank.”3

In the months since, the Israeli military has increased home demolitions and the destruction of infrastructure in the West Bank. On November 3, 2020, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), “the Israeli authorities demolished 83 structures in the Bedouin community of Humsa Al Bqai’a, in the northern Jordan Valley, displacing 73 people, including 41 children. This is the largest number of people displaced in a single incident since March 2016, and the largest number of structures demolished in a single incident since OCHA started monitoring demolitions in 2009.”4 In that same month, the authorities also destroyed a 1.5-kilometer water pipeline, severing the villages of Mughayer al-Abid and Khirbet al-Majaz in the Hebron district from their water supply.5 In fact, between January and October 2020, when the virus was spreading, Israel demolished 604 structures and displaced 788 people.6

The coronavirus has also spread to the densely populated Gaza Strip, threatening its 2 million people who are trapped under an onerous blockade now in its 14th year. According to The Lancet, “The Gaza Strip faces high levels of poverty, unemployment, food insecurity, and lacks sufficient water while the blockade disrupts medical supply chains, curtails the movement of patients and health workers, and severely inhibits medical capacity-building and public health development.”7 In Gaza, furthermore, physical distancing is impossible. In Jabalya refugee camp, for example, 113,990 people live on half a square mile,8 and this is not the highest population density among Gaza’s refugee camps.

Although the Israeli authorities have allowed some medical supplies (donated by international organizations) into Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Naftali Bennett offered a deal to Gaza’s Hamas authorities: ventilators and other forms of medical and humanitarian aid in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in the 2014 war on the Strip.9 In making this offer, Mr. Bennett appears unconcerned that Gaza’s severely diminished economy and healthcare system has been undermined by a range of Israeli-imposed measures, notably the blockade, and three wars between 2008 and 2014, which, at



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