The Gaza Ministry of Health said on Monday that they now consider Gaza to be a polio epidemic area due to Israel’s relentless assault and deadly humanitarian blockade, portending yet more horrific circumstances being forced on Palestinians in coming months unless Israeli officials agree to a ceasefire soon.
Health officials declared the epidemic in a post on Telegram and warned that it will not only affect Palestinians in Gaza, but also people in neighboring countries. The announcement comes after international health officials announced earlier this month that they had detected the virus that causes polio, specifically polio type 2, in multiple wastewater samples from across Gaza.
The epidemic “poses a health threat to the people of Gaza, to neighboring countries, and a setback to global efforts to end polio,” the ministry said. It called for “immediate intervention” to end Israel’s genocide and address the sanitation catastrophe that has resulted from Israel’s assault on Gaza’s sanitation system.
Health officials have been close to eradicating polio worldwide for years, with type 2 having been declared eradicated in 2015. But with this epidemic, polio may soon spread to nearby areas like Egypt. Children in Gaza and beyond are particularly at risk, as the World Health Organization stopped including immunization from type 2 polio about a decade ago, a decision some have criticized.
Poliovirus is spread through the consumption of fecally-contaminated water or food, and can cause paralysis in affected individuals. The spread of disease in Gaza, including poliovirus, Hepatitis A, and others, has been occurring nearly unmitigated for months, with hundreds of thousands of tons of trash strewn about in large piles, vermin and bugs swarming and sewage filling the streets where children play and people travel.
Conditions are especially bad in al-Mawasi, which encompasses the supposed “humanitarian safe zone” Israel declared amid its invasion of Rafah in May and has since bombed many times. The area is essentially nothing but desert and lacks basic infrastructure; Oxfam said in June that there are only 121 bathrooms for 500,000 people sheltering there, or 4,130 people per toilet. The area has only grown more crowded since June.
Advocates for Palestinian rights have called on the Biden administration to recognize the polio crisis and to act aggressively to pursue a ceasefire and ensure that polio vaccines immediately reach the population of Gaza. The Israeli military has already announced that it will be offering vaccines to its soldiers, but has said nothing about limiting the spread of the virus for Palestinians.
Health officials have said that they have not yet detected any cases of paralysis caused by the poliovirus. But Israel’s assault has rendered disease surveillance virtually impossible.
Last week, U.S. health workers who have volunteered in Gaza amid the genocide said that every single person they encountered in Gaza was sick, injured, or both, with little accounting of disease. It’s possible, then, that there could be many cases of polio infecting people that have gone undetected; the health care workers noted, for instance, that they estimate that tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed due to Israel’s famine campaign but have not been counted due to Israel’s destruction of the health system and other basic infrastructure.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.