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Sickness Can Be ‘Death Sentence’ in Gaza as War Fuels Disease 

A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
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Sickness Can Be ‘Death Sentence’ in Gaza as War Fuels Disease 

A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)
A Palestinian woman reacts at the site following Israeli strikes on a tent camp sheltering displaced people, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, at the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, September 10, 2024. (Reuters)

In Gaza, falling ill can be a death sentence. Cancer patients are waiting to die, polio has returned, and many of the doctors and nurses who might have offered help are dead while the hospitals they worked at have been reduced to rubble.

Doctors and health professionals say that even if the Israel-Hamas war were to stop tomorrow, it will take years to rebuild the healthcare sector and people will continue to die because preventable diseases are not being treated on time.

"People are dying on a daily basis because they cannot get the basic treatment they need," said Riham Jafari, advocacy and communications coordinator at rights group ActionAid Palestine.

Cancer patients "are waiting for their turn to die," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed on limited pauses in the fighting to allow children to be vaccinated against polio after a one-year-old baby boy was found to be partially paralyzed from the disease, the first case in the crowded strip in 25 years.

But even as crowds gathered in the southern cities of Rafah and Khan Younis for vaccinations on Sept. 5, bombs continued to fall in other areas with Gaza health officials saying an Israeli strike killed five people at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah.

"It will take long and so much effort in order to restore the level of care that we used to have in Gaza," said Mohammed Aghaalkurdi, medical program lead at Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Every day he sees around 180 children with skin diseases that he "just cannot treat," he said.

"Due to vaccination campaign interruptions, lack of supplies, lack of hygiene items and infection prevention control material, it (healthcare) is just deteriorating."

The conflict was triggered when Hamas-led fighters attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies.

Since then, more than 40,800 Palestinians have been killed by Israel's offensive in the enclave, according to the Gaza health ministry, with around 92,000 wounded.

But beyond the death toll from the fighting and airstrikes, people are also succumbing to illnesses that could be cured in normal circumstances.

As with the re-emergence of polio, children will bear the brunt of these long-term consequences, health experts say.

"We are talking about disabilities, we are talking about intellectual disabilities, mental health issues," said Aghaalkurdi.

"Things that will stick to the child until they die."

SPECIALISTS KILLED

At least 490 healthcare workers have been killed since the conflict erupted, according to Gaza's health ministry. A Reuters investigation found that 55 highly qualified specialist doctors were among those killed.

With each specialist killed, Gaza has lost a source of knowledge and human connections, a devastating blow on top of the destruction of most of the Strip's hospitals.

Many people have become weak from a lack of food, as prices of basic commodities have more than quadrupled since the conflict began. When they become ill, they are also too frightened to journey to the few remaining hospitals, Jafari said.

Eighty-two percent of children aged between 6 and 23 months have limited access to quality food, according to a report by the Global Network Against Food Crises, and more than 90% of children under 5-years-old suffer from infectious diseases.

Meanwhile, skin diseases are rampant because of a lack of cleaning supplies and hygiene products, Jafari said. In markets, a bottle of shampoo can cost around $50.

Israel has severely restricted the flow of food and aid into Gaza, and humanitarian agencies have warned of the risk of famine.

Jafari expects a reckoning after the war ends.

"There is delayed suffering, delayed sadness, there are diseases that are being delayed," she said. "There is an entire journey of suffering that is being delayed until the end of the war," she said.

CANCER 'DEATH SENTENCE'

Manal Ragheb Fakhri al-Masri, 42, is one of those facing that health reckoning.

Displaced seven times with her nine children, she has a heart condition and a benign tumor in her stomach and was supposed to leave Gaza for treatment earlier this year.

But then her husband was killed and she could not bear to leave her children.

Now, having also suffered several strokes, she is bedridden, unable to leave her tent by the sea in Al-Mawasi, which Israel had declared a safe zone. She has not had any medicine in five months and has not even been able to shower for two weeks.

"My husband used to take care of me and get medicine and feed his children," she said in a phone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Now I do not know what do. We do not have the most basic things."

Her children try to help as much as they can and sometimes bring her seawater for her to wash with but the salty liquid offers no respite. Her children are also all suffering from red rashes but they have no creams to soothe their burning limbs.

Waseem Alzaanin, a general practitioner with the Palestine Red Crescent Society, said the lack of drugs, equipment and medical facilities is killing his cancer patients.

Gaza's only cancer center was destroyed earlier this year, he said, and many of his stage-one cancer patients are now classified as stage-four.

"The most basic requirements are not present. We cannot do anything except give them painkillers and make them comfortable with what life they have left," he said.

"It is like a death sentence," he added. "Let us not kid ourselves. We have no medical system."

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Grief Over Gaza, Qualms over US Election Add up to Anguish for Many Palestinian Americans

Layla Elabed, co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, sits at a table, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Jose Juarez)
Layla Elabed, co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, sits at a table, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Jose Juarez)
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Grief Over Gaza, Qualms over US Election Add up to Anguish for Many Palestinian Americans

Layla Elabed, co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, sits at a table, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Jose Juarez)
Layla Elabed, co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, sits at a table, Friday, Aug. 30, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich. (AP Photo/Jose Juarez)

Demoralized by the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian American Samia Assed found in Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension — and her running mate pick — “a little ray of hope.”

That hope, she said, shattered during last month’s Democratic National Convention, where a request for a Palestinian American speaker was denied and listening to Harris left her feeling like the Democratic presidential nominee will continue the US policies that have outraged many in the anti-war camp.

“I couldn’t breathe because I felt unseen and erased,” said Assed, a community organizer in New Mexico.

Under different circumstances, Assed would have reveled in the groundbreaking rise of a woman of color as her party’s nominee. Instead, she agonizes over her ballot box options, according to The AP.

For months, many Palestinian Americans have been contending with the double whammy of the rising Palestinian death toll and suffering in Gaza and their own government’s support for Israel in the war. Alongside pro-Palestinian allies, they’ve grieved, organized, lobbied and protested as the killings and destruction unfolded on their screens or touched their own families. Now, they also wrestle with tough, deeply personal voting decisions, including in battleground states.

“It’s a very hard time for Palestinian youth and Palestinian Americans,” Assed said. “There’s a lot of pain.”

Without a meaningful change, voting for Harris would feel for her “like a jab in the heart,” she said. At the same time, Assed, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, would like to help block another Donald Trump presidency and remain engaged with the Democrats “to hold them liable,” she said.

“It’s really a difficult place to be in.”

She’s not alone.

In Georgia, the Gaza bloodshed has been haunting Ghada Elnajjar. She said the war claimed the lives of more than 100 members of her extended family in Gaza, where her parents were born.

She saw missed opportunities at the DNC to connect with voters like her. Besides the rejection of the request for a Palestinian speaker, Elnajjar found a disconnect between US policies and Harris’ assertion that she and President Joe Biden were working to accomplish a cease-fire and hostage deal.

“Without stopping US financial support and military support to Israel, this will not stop,” said Elnajjar who in 2020 campaigned for Biden. “I’m a US citizen. I’m a taxpayer ... and I feel betrayed and neglected.”

She’ll keep looking for policy changes, but, if necessary, remain “uncommitted,” potentially leaving the top of the ticket blank. Harris must earn her vote, she said.

Harris, in her DNC speech, said she and Biden were working to end the war such that "Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

She said she “will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” while describing the suffering in Gaza as “heartbreaking.”

While her recent rhetoric on Palestinian suffering has been viewed as empathetic by some who had soured on Biden over the war, the lack of a concrete policy shift appears to have increasingly frustrated many of those who want the war to end. Activists demanding a permanent ceasefire have urged an embargo on US weapons to Israel, whose military campaign in Gaza has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.

The war was sparked by an Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages.

Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American and co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, said the demand for a policy shift remains. Nationally, “uncommitted” has garnered hundreds of thousands of votes in Democratic primaries.

Elabed said Harris and her team have been invited to meet before Sept. 15 with “uncommitted” movement leaders from key swing states and with Palestinian families with relatives killed in Gaza. After that date, she said, “we will need to make the decision if we can actually mobilize our base” to vote for Harris.

Without a policy change, “we can’t do an endorsement,” and will, instead, continue talking about the “dangers” of a Trump presidency, leaving voters to vote their conscience, she added.

Some other anti-war activists are taking it further, advocating for withholding votes from Harris in the absence of a change.

“There’s pressure to punish the Democratic Party,” Elabed said. “Our position is continue taking up space within the Democratic Party,” and push for change from the inside.

Some of the tensions surfaced at an August rally in Michigan when anti-war protesters interrupted Harris. Initially, Harris said everybody’s voice matters. As the shouting continued, with demonstrators chanting that they “won’t vote for genocide,” she took a sharper tone.

“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said.

Nada Al-Hanooti, national deputy organizing director with the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, rejects as unfair the argument by some that traditionally Democratic voters who withhold votes from Harris are in effect helping Trump. She said the burden should be on Harris and her party.

“Right now, it’s a struggle being a Palestinian American,” she said. “I don’t want a Trump presidency, but, at the same time, the Democratic Party needs to win our vote.”

Though dismayed that no Palestinian speaker was allowed on the DNC stage, Al-Hanooti said she felt inspired by how “uncommitted” activists made Palestinians part of the conversation at the convention. Activists were given space there to hold a forum discussing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

“We in the community still need to continue to push Harris on conditioning aid, on a ceasefire,” she said. “The fight is not over.”

She said she’s never known grief like that she has experienced over the past year. In the girls of Gaza, she sees her late grandmother who, at 10, was displaced from her home during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and lived in a Syrian refugee camp, dreaming of returning home.

“It just completely tears me apart,” Al-Hanooti said.

She tries to channel her pain into putting pressure on elected officials and encouraging community members to vote, despite encountering what she said was increased apathy, with many feeling that their vote won’t matter. “Our job at Emgage is simply right now to get our Muslim community to vote because our power is in the collective.”

In 2020, Emgage — whose political action committee then endorsed Biden — and other groups worked to maximize Muslim American turnout, especially in battleground states. Muslims make up a small percentage of Americans overall, but activists hope that in states with notable Muslim populations, such as Michigan, energizing more of them makes a difference in close races — and demonstrates the community’s political power.

Some voters want to send a message.

“Our community has given our votes away cheaply,” argued Omar Abuattieh, a pharmacy major at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Once we can start to understand our votes as a bargaining tool, we’ll have more power.”

For Abuattieh, whose mother was born in Gaza, that means planning to vote third party “to demonstrate the power in numbers of a newly activated community that deserves future consultation.”

A Pew Research Center survey in February found that US Muslims are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people than many other Americans are and that only 6% of Muslim American adults believe the US is striking the right balance between the Israelis and Palestinians. Nearly two-thirds of Muslim registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, according to the survey.

But US Muslims, who are racially and ethnically diverse, are not monolithic in their political behavior; some have publicly supported Harris in this election cycle. In 2020, among Muslim voters, 64% supported Biden and 35% supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast.

The Harris campaign said it has appointed two people for Muslim and Arab outreach.

Harris “will continue to meet with leaders from Palestinian, Muslim, Israeli and Jewish communities, as she has throughout her vice presidency,” the campaign said in response to questions, without specifically commenting on the uncommitted movement’s request for a meeting before Sept. 15.

Harris is being scrutinized by those who say the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done enough to pressure Israel to end the war and by Republicans looking to brand her as insufficient in her support for Israel.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign's national press secretary, said Trump “will once again deliver peace through strength to rebuild and expand the peace coalition he built in his first term to create long-term safety and security for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

Many Arab and Muslim Americans were angered by Trump’s ban, while in office, that affected travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, which Biden rescinded.

In Michigan, Ali Ramlawi, who owns a restaurant in Ann Arbor, said Harris’ nomination initially gave him relief on various domestic issues, but the DNC left him disappointed on the Palestinian question.

Before the convention, he expected to vote Democratic, but now says he’s considering backing the Green Party for the top of the ticket or leaving that blank.

“Our vote shouldn’t be taken for granted,” he said. “I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils.”