Alwaght- Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has recently published a report on dire humanitarian situation in Gaza one year after Israeli regime's 51-day aggression.
The appalling human toll of the 51-day war- more than 2,200 were killed and more than 11,000 were wounded, mostly women and children- or destruction of more than 12,000 houses and more than 70 hospitals or health structures was not the end of Israeli regimes crime against innocent Gazans.
After wreaking havoc on highly-populated coastal enclave, the Israeli regime military launched an inhuman air-ground-sea blockade on Gaza, continuing to starve the territory of desperately needed supplies, including building materials that could help rebuild some of the neighborhoods that were reduced to rubble by the Israeli regime military.
Israeli regime has put severe restrictions on cement and other building materials, claiming that they are considered “dual-use” items that could be used to create weapons, leading to few houses being repaired in the strip.
“In our post-operative clinic in Gaza, the majority of our patients were treated for burns from explosions caused by the use of unsafe home heating products or in household cooking accidents in homes damaged during the war. Sixty percent of them were children,” MSF report reads, adding that "As a consequence of the blockade, people are still living in terribly unsafe conditions and are almost entirely dependent on outside aid."
Unemployment is at record high—more than 40 percent overall and more than 60 percent among the young—and 80 percent of the population is at least partially dependent on humanitarian aid.
Pointing to Israeli regime's bid to occupy more and more Palestinian's territories, MSF says "While the devastation of the war in Gaza and the ongoing blockade of the strip have garnered the most international attention, the occupation of the West Bank illustrates another form of oppression that also has widespread public health consequences."
"The Palestinian population in the West Bank is subjected to indignities, threats, and humiliations on a daily basis. Today, due to settlements, byways, checkpoints, and military deployments, Palestinians can only inhabit less than 40 percent of the West Bank," MSF statement adds.
Reporting on its mental health programmers, MSF reveals that many Palestinians are suffering from psychological disorders as a result of being subjected to endless harassment, frequent (and unpunished) settler violence against individuals and property, night raids, administrative detention, or other acts.
Grillon, a MSF member, says “On a daily basis we see patients, a third of whom are younger than 13, in a constant state of anxiety and terror because of night-time incursions by Israeli soldiers and settler attacks. We’ve been treating the same families presenting the same symptoms for the past ten years. Nothing has changed.”
According to MSF, as a direct result of the perpetuation of the occupation and the complete failure of any political process, Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank are trapped in a never-ending cycle of violence that must be addressed frankly and urgently.
Statement published on Doctors Without Borders's official website denounced measures taken by Israeli regime in the name of security as it says that these actions "must be judged in terms of their humanitarian fallout". "And the governments and international institutions either explicitly or tacitly supporting these policies must likewise consider the human costs of these policies, given the undeniable devastation they have wrought," the statement emphasizes.
“Trying to create a false equivalence in terms of responsibility for the current situation in the West Bank and Gaza simply obscures the reality of responsibility for the violence in the Occupied Territories,” says Dr Mego Terzian, president of MSF France.
“Employing the rhetoric of self-defence to seize territory and continue a brutalising occupation, Israel and its international backers have sought to codify a system that is wounding Palestinians day after day, smothering life and hope, and guaranteeing more of the same in the future,” Dr Mego Terzian concludes.
