Israel Is Hindering the Delivery of Polio Vaccines, Gaza’s Health Ministry Says

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The United Nations is warning the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains “beyond catastrophic” as more than 1 million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food rations in August amid Israel’s relentless assault. Israel’s 11-month campaign has killed more than 15,000 children and enabled the besieged territory’s first polio outbreak in a quarter-century. INARA founder Arwa Damon just got back from spending two weeks in Gaza, where the nonprofit currently provides medical and mental healthcare to Palestinian children. “Israel has decimated every single aspect of any sort of infrastructure within the Gaza Strip, from sewage to water to electricity to you name it,” says Damon, who reports that humanitarian assistance has diminished significantly while displaced Palestinians play a “macabre, dark, twisted game” of trying to escape constant Israeli bombing.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk specifically now about Gaza, where you just were for two weeks. The U.N. is warning the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains, quote, “beyond catastrophic” as more than a million Palestinians in Gaza did not receive any food rations in August amidst Israel’s relentless assault, this coming as Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israel is hindering the delivery of polio vaccines as it refuses to coordinate the entry of medical teams to parts of southern Gaza. This is Karam Yassin, a 10-year-old Palestinian boy in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.

KARAM YASSIN: [translated] We want to play with our friends, go to school, eat and drink. But this vaccination is of no use. It’s only useful against polio, but the war has destroyed us. It has destroyed our houses. I wish I can play with my friends, go to school. I wish to eat and drink like I used to before.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is a Palestinian mother, Ghada Judeh, who recently got her children vaccinated at Yafa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where she’s also volunteering for the polio vaccination campaign.

GHADA JUDEH: [translated] We are displaced from Deir al-Balah. I gave my children the polio vaccine to protect them from disease, but I can’t protect them from strikes and from death, unless you help us, just as you helped us and delivered the medications to us to protect our children. So, please, stand with us to stop the war so that our children can live peacefully and to continue their studies.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, can you talk about the crisis in Gaza, where you just spent two weeks?

ARWA DAMON: I mean, let’s start by talking about how it is that polio reemerged in Gaza after 25 years. And it really boils down to the fact that Israel has decimated every single aspect of any sort of infrastructure within the Gaza Strip, from sewage to water to electricity to you name it. And what has happened in Gaza right now is that you have a situation where piles and piles of trash are everywhere. Open sewage is running in the streets. Hygiene is just about impossible, made even more impossible, Amy, because we have not been able to get in to southern or central Gaza hygiene or even just bars of soap in months right now.

And so, polio is seeing right now this vaccination effort, but let’s talk about the other diseases. Let’s talk about the fact that in Nasser Hospital alone, the head of the pediatrics department said that two children per week were dying of hepatitis A, also largely due to the lack of hygiene. Let’s talk about the fact that meningitis, that can potentially be deadly, is spreading, or this horrific skin disease called impetigo, that basically is these blisters that start to form, and then they pus open and ooze and bleed, and then, eventually, as they’re healing, crust up but are horrifically itchy. And the more severe cases, children need to be hospitalized for that. And if they’re not hospitalized, it can lead to, you know, potential kidney failure, which can also lead to death.

Let’s talk about the fact that when you’re driving through Gaza and people recognize that you’re a humanitarian organization, children run up to the car and gesture like this, that they want soap. A bar of soap is something that we are not able to provide to the Gazan population. The lack of hygiene and the fact that if we were able to provide Gazans with a bar of soap, studies show that that would reduce communicable diseases by about 40%, means that Gazans are suffering exponentially more now than they need to be. And very little aid is getting in. If you look at the number of humanitarian trucks that, you know, have gotten in in August and July and June, it’s roughly 60 to 70 total.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about, when it comes to this polio vaccine, the kids have to get two doses of it? I mean, how do they come out of places where they are hiding, where they’ve been displaced one, two, three, eight, nine times? How do they feel safe enough to go to places where they get this polio vaccine and then have to go back? And what does it mean that Israel says it’ll bomb this area but not this today, and then tomorrow they will bomb this area, and then you can go over there that they bombed the other day?

ARWA DAMON: I mean, you know, you talk to Gazans, and they really feel as if they’re sort of part of this very macabre, dark, twisted game where they’re just getting shuffled around trying to stay ahead of the bombing, but then, you know, still risking it.

Now, when it comes specifically to the polio vaccine, there are theoretically these pauses that have been set up in specific areas. And then, within those specific areas, where these pauses are meant to be lasting for a day or two or three or however long it is deemed to take, there are numerous points, as well as mobile points, that people are able to go to to actually receive the polio vaccine itself. But it is extraordinarily challenging. It is very, very difficult even under the best of conditions to undertake a vaccination campaign, you know, this wide and this broad.

And frankly, I hope I’m wrong, and I hope the doctor that I was speaking to is wrong, but he was saying that he doesn’t really believe that it is going to be all that successful, and that the fact that Israel is allowing this to proceed is just a smokescreen so that it can sort of continue to push forward this narrative of, “Oh, but we’re allowing humanitarian assistance. Look, we allowed the polio vaccine to happen,” and not really address the sort of bigger picture issues when it comes to the reality that humanitarian assistance is barely trickling in to Gaza, that the levels of aid that were able to provide to the people have diminished significantly, and that the number of people in need has grown drastically, and that people are being crushed into this smaller and smaller space. I mean, the conditions there, Amy, are inhumane. People there aren’t living; they’re barely surviving.

And there are alternative routes that Israel can provide for aid organizations to be able to get assistance to the people. I’ll give you one example. So, we were talking about the lack of hygiene kits and soap in the southern and central part of Gaza. Now, the southern and central part of Gaza is, for example, receiving fresh vegetables on the commercial market. What this means is that most people can’t afford them, but we, as aid organizations, can purchase them — albeit prices are quite astronomical — and deliver fresh food parcels to the people. Now, in the north of Gaza, there is no vegetables on the commercial market, but, ironically, hygiene kits are getting in to the north. What we are not permitted to do is move vegetables from the south to the north, where they’re needed, or hygiene kits from the north to the south. And this is just one sort of example of the various different hurdles and obstacles that are deliberately being placed in our way.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we go, Arwa, I wanted to ask you personally about your own life experience and how it’s informed what you’ve done, from being an international reporter at CNN to founding INARA. Your mother Syrian, your father American, you grew up in places like Morocco and Turkey.

Just two days after October 7th, you wrote a piece for New Lines Magazine titled “As Gaza Braces for a Ground Invasion, the Circle of Violence Continues.” You write in it, “We need to understand the past, the traumas of the past, traumas that have been passed on generation to generation, both on the Israeli and on the Palestinian side. We need to understand those intense emotions that can embed themselves in and change our DNA — paralyzing fear, the desperate need to belong, the longing for home and safety, the desire for a dignified life. We also need to understand how those emotions have been historically manipulated, twisted, and how from the start the failings of the key power brokers — incidentally neither Palestinian nor Israeli — have led to where we are today.” Your final thoughts, Arwa Damon?

ARWA DAMON: You know, I’m a big believer in the need to understand a person or even, you know, a country’s emotional trajectory, because we need to understand how and why it is that people act and think a certain way, if we want to alter the path that we’re on. And I think, obviously, you know, in my journalistic career, I tried to focus on that by storytelling and by sharing the human story that exists beyond the bombs and the bullets. And in the humanitarian space, I mean, look, I still tell a lot of stories, but I also believe that it’s very important for us to do what we can for those in need, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it can also help alter the balance of their own psyche.

When you see a child who has been so deeply traumatized, you look at that little kid, and their eyes are deadened. That spark of life doesn’t exist. But when you begin to provide them with medical and mental assistance, when you begin to support them and their family, you see that spark begin to reemerge. And I think that is something that we should not negate and that we should really be focusing our efforts and our capacities on trying to bring, because the more that we abandon populations, the more violent our world is going to become.

AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, we want to thank you for being with us, award-winning journalist, founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza, previously spent 18 years at CNN. She just returned from a two-week trip to Gaza. She is joining us from the capital of Ukraine, from Kyiv.

Coming up, we speak to Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s nephew. He says President Trump once told him as they sat in the Oval Office that disabled Americans “should just die.” Fred Trump has written his memoir. It’s called All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way. Stay with us.