WORT 89.9FM Madison

Israel's War on Gaza Will Be an Ongoing Health Catastrophe

According the to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7th, 2023. Another 95,000+ have been injured. These numbers are certainly an undercount. The number of Gaza's Silent Killings, or those who have died due to the crumbling medical infrastructure, continues to climb. Cases of polio have been found amongst Palestinian children. Communicable diseases are being spread due to a lack of sanitary infrastructure. People are been unable to access medical treatments for their critical, but treatable illnesses. On today's show, Esty Dinur talks with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a California-based trauma surgeon, who recently traveled to Gaza to provide care at Gaza's European Hospital. He explains what he saw, and how chaotic things were inside one of Gaza's few hospitals. Yara Asi, author How War Kills: The Overlooked Threats to our Health, also joined Dinur on the show to discuss the lasting impact war will have on mortality and health. Asi argues that even if a ceasefire happened tomorrow, the impact on health with continue for years and generations. Image by Parentingupstream from Pixabay

Broadcast on:: 20 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

Hi this is SD host of the Friday a public affair I hope you help us by contributing to WORT and you can also subscribe to the podcast. Bye See you every I grab the mic because I like to take you to another mental level No power frequency radiolatization the big sound no change without struggle. No one in power ain't giving up No change without struggle. No one in power WORT 89.9 FM listener sponsored community radio Madison, Wisconsin And hello welcome to a public affair I am SDD North first of all thanks to the donors and pleasures who supported us in the past two weeks. We did fairly well the first week we fell $77 short the second week we made a goal at the very last minute the station however has not made its goal. But we are lucky to have some listeners who declared who are going to give money and match everything that you donate during this hour and until Monday so and and you can still get the premium that is available you can see on the website wortfm.org click on the donate and we would love to see a few $77 pledges or donations during this hour and as we see them I will thank people if you can't donate $77 we'll be happy to take 25 or 50 we'll also be happy to take 100 or 200 so we can continue the very important work that we are doing here and today we're having one of these shows heavy difficult and necessary conversations that I know you expect from this show I did not want to do it during the pledge drive as it's very painful but we are doing it today and if you appreciate these kinds of shows please show your support again today so as we watch devices exploding in Lebanon injuring maimin and killing people as we watch the Israeli military destroying infrastructure in the west bank killing civilians and shoving the corpses from roof as we just heard as we watch Israeli settlers burning homes and crops and attacking farmers in the mass of ariata area the situation in Gaza continues growing worse by the meme moment while the American government to the tune of billions of our tax dollars continues supporting Israel's push to become a country from the river to the sea so today we will go back to Gaza to discuss the health care situation there and we have to guess with us dr ferroz sidwa is a trauma surgeon at San Joaquin hospital in Stockton, California he recently traveled to and provided medical care in Gaza also with us is yara m asi assistant professor at the university of central florida in the school of global health management and informatics and co-director of the palestine pogum for health and human rights she's the author of how war kills the overlooked threats to our health which was published this year and thanks to both of you for joining us today and would you start by commenting on the events of the recent days what have you been thinking what have you been feeling as you watch more destruction this time in lebanon yara would you like to start yeah sure thank you for having us to continue to talk about this issue especially as we near nearly a year after october 7th you know there have been so many periods of days where that have shocked me in the past 11 months any number of events that eventually over time just become kind of cumulative stories and yet there continue to be more and new terrible stories coming out of gaza yes but increasingly out of the west bank and now lebanon as well um it's i have to say completely predictable that i think we've gotten to this point after everything we have seen over the past nearly a year and that i know we'll talk about in this hour just completely um you know destruction of a health care system you know into basically inducing famine conditions and now polio outbreak with absolutely no accountability for any of those things increasing settler violence and military raids in the west bank no accountability for those i mean the reason that we have accountability mechanisms is to stop these things from happening and so if we don't use those mechanisms those things are not just going to continue but they're going to escalate everyone predicted this i think as early as october 10th so i'm i'm really sad to see the place where we are and at the same time not shocked at all yeah um dr for us and i i i just want to let uh listeners know that you are there in your scrubs you actually found someone to sub for you for an hour we really really appreciate it and then you'll get back to what you're doing um how how do you feel and and what have been your thoughts in recent days yeah no i'm glad to be here um i think it's we are said is exactly right uh the this is all predictable uh it's not just predictable since october 7th it's probably predictable going back to the alcohol courts that we would have ended up in this place of plenty plenty of people did predict it uh you know Omar Bartov just speaking about after october 7th he uh he wrote in the New York Times i can't remember if it was November or December but he wrote that he uh he didn't think it was genocidal then but he thought it was you could see how it was going there uh and then very interestingly he wrote again then now he does think it's genocidal but it wasn't published in the New York Times it was published in the Guardian where Americans aren't going to read it uh probably you guys will but other than that nobody will so the like era said there are accountability mechanisms um but the one that we actually have control over as Americans is just our own vote our own money our own whatever we do um and it's we're we're the ones we can talk about israel because it's important and what israel's doing is just horrifying um you know so with my own eyes unfortunately but um but we all know that Israel can't do anything it's doing without our support and so that's you know our that's you know i guess so to answer your question i think it's just everything is just everything that's going on just redoubles my my efforts to try and get our politicians to pay attention to this which so far i've come to absolutely no yeah i think it's very frustrating for all of us who have been active against um israel the the israel u.s war on palestine um as we see no change whatsoever i also want to mention uh that uh omele bel tobe was a guest on this show and um that article in the guardian is very important for those of us who those of you who have not read it yet uh please look for it i'm glad you mentioned it uh for rose um yara give us a a general uh update on this state of health and health calient gaza um well the the the top line is that it's it's extremely extremely dire um you know gaza has is no stranger to uh air strikes and military bombardment there's been you know four major escalations since 2007 and we've seen hospitals being bombed we've seen refugee camps being bombed we've seen amputated children um but this you know what is possible to do to a people and a health system in nearly a year uh we really have no analog for this um especially because you know and i want to emphasize to your audience how how small gaza is it's a very small territory so when you're seeing these drone images of the widespread destruction of every city block every home every shop every mosque every school um this is what most of the territory looks like now so at the at the base level just kind of try to imagine living in that destruction uh very few people have access to shelter those who do the shelters are very overcrowded very underserved that's why we're seeing these infectious disease outbreaks um we've seen you know since israel imposed this quote unquote complete siege in early october we've seen ongoing shortages of food water electricity was cut off and so shortages of fuel needed to run generators this is of course affected not just being able to refrigerate food and filter water but store certain pharmaceuticals and you know keep dialysis machines working and so um aside from all of the tens of thousands and at this point likely more than a hundred thousand injuries that include amputations and other things that are trauma related of course people in gaza like anywhere else have you know the same health issues we have they have cancer their kids get the flu they you know stub a toe and break it they're not really able to get care for anything um we've seen some cases where patients are being you know evacuated from gaza medical cases but it is nowhere near what we need um at the world health organization is reporting that at least two-thirds of hospitals are essentially non-functional many because they've been destroyed completely we saw images of israeli soldiers and hospitals that hadn't been destroyed completely literally just smashing vital expensive hospital equipment so even if people could return to those facilities if they're left standing the equipment is destroyed um you know we've we've seen the polio outbreak of just a few weeks ago of course the world was able to mobilize on at least that issue to get vaccinations in but we will undoubtedly see more infectious disease outbreaks we will continue to see uh more likely unnecessary or amputations that were made necessary due to lack of of proper conditions and you know uh specialists that are needed i it's it's really i mean i could really just keep going on about this and i i won't but it's every every aspect of life needed to to live to remain healthy to for children to grow for disabled people to get the care they need people with chronic illnesses all of it is essentially decimated and the health care workers that are in gaza both local and those internationals that are able to come in are working in such horrific conditions it is and and for those that are local to gaza have been working in these conditions for nearly a year while fearing for their own lives while losing their own family members it's it's absolute nightmare it's an absolute nightmare uh on every single level for us you will actually there and you will practice in there um share with us your um your first impressions as you got into gaza what it was like and um what it was like to start working in in a hospital yeah well i was at european hospital uh from march 25th to April 8th and at that time european hospital was definitely like the best resource city block in hall of gaza um and yet it was horrendous uh it was an absolute nightmare uh we we entered in the dark um we got there during ramadan and so the if they're actually delayed our kidding in the gaza but the uh we uh when we got to european hospital you know kids just surround the van because you know gaza is a very young territory but i have more than half of its children actually and the um so the kids just kind of surround the van you get out and you know you can tell they're all thin they're all shorter than they should be the malnutrition in gaza didn't start on october 7th just skyrocketed after that but um the uh the the the the impression you get is when when we got to european hospital the impression we got was that first of all the hospital itself was actually displaced persons camp um there were about 10 to 15 000 people sheltering on the grounds of the hospital itself and not just outside but also inside lining the corridors uh in the radiology department literally everywhere that somebody could uh could could make a tent um families had and there was obviously incredibly crowded there's babies crawling across the the hallway while you're trying to roll a stretcher down you know your bird's gonna cut the kid in half by doing it um and then on top of that there were 220 beds in this hospital but 1500 people admitted uh i did wound care rounds for the first three days um very un glorious work but the um we found about 200 people uh who needed daily operative wound care meaning i need to take them to the operating room cut some part of the wound away because it's necrotic or it's infected whatever there are four operating rooms at cosy european hospital i was not going to work 200 people every day it's impossible and like lignar just mentioned you know people still have colesus side if they still have appendicitis they still have a bowel show just regular old things that might happen to some guy in california right right next door and he'll be brought to the hospital for it uh so the the the the whole place just completely uh overwhelmed by the increased need by the massive devastating like actually i think shift the hospital was completely destroyed on march 29th i think that's when the israelis pulled out so we were there during that time um i still remember actually we got the uh the uh avo dognusch twins rafik and rafik who've been their names are already known so it's okay to talk about them um they they were actually put on a donkey cart by by their family i have no idea how they actually got them out of chiffon during the raid um and just walked them for two days south until they came to european hospital uh the rafif uh the i think she's about 13 year old girl um she arrived certainly with the temporal wasting her eyes were sunk and she had had her uh right ankle amputated her right tibia was broken so she still had an external fixate around that but uh but she was awake coherent conscious and with food she could uh end proper medical and surgical care she could recover but her brother and stm sorry i can tell you're having a hard time here in this but i can't take it but yeah please continue talking about it but but her brother and i i'm i don't want to make the no please please tell us the truth that his mother arrived so malnourished that his ribs were exposed uh his um his scapula was exposed his spine was exposed he had wounds on his buttock from the israel air strike that had killed his mother tore his intestines apart and killed ten other members of his family he had wounds on his buttocks that hadn't healed since november it's march now and he's completely incoherent he has no idea where he is and uh you know if anybody wants to know what he looked like just to look at pictures of people who were free from Auschwitz i mean really it was that bad and there the habit of show you pictures if anybody doesn't believe me it's uh it was horrendous and i mean and this you know that that was an extreme case to be sure but that just shows you how bad the north of gaza was these two kids were in a hospital and they were still like this you know it's just outrageous and there's nothing to it nothing it's very hard to you know i i kind of think of gaza's society as like water and food infrastructure is like the base layer right and then hospitals or maybe the next layer up and then maybe um maybe hospitals and housing in the next layer up and then uh universities and the ability to actually build a society or above that israel has destroyed that very top layer literally every university is gone i shouldn't say israel the united states in israel together have destroyed every university almost every school even like down to like just grade school we're talking about um had obliterated the hospital system it's completely useless now i mean you can go in you can get damages put on if you're lucky there's no sterility there's no cleanliness there's surgical success is completely elusive um women are having c-sections without anesthesia without pain medications without antibiotics so then they're getting horrendous uterine infections because they're so and they're so malnourished they can't uh they can't fight off normal infections like they would be able to um their kids are coming there their newborns are coming back actually the the ministry of health just released uh an updated list of fully identified um casualties it's important to remember they're probably they're they're capturing a fraction of people even just who have died by violence uh there's tons of people who are buried in mass graves who are buried under rubble uh who died at home ages and then they never made it to a morgue so they can't be identified uh even just on that list the first i think i can't remember it was like four the first 14 pages are newborns it's kids under one year old it's say if i remember it it's seven hundred forty children under one year of age are fully identified as having been killed by the israelan military in gazas since october 7th that's almost the same number as all of the israelis civilians who were killed on october 7th so these numbers are just utterly they're just insane i mean it's hard to come up with uh it it's like iris says it's hard to actually describe this as except it's just the you're they're not they we are burning a society down to its roots they've even destroyed the food in the water system now like yara mentioned ability there's that there's a good report from october called water war crimes uh that really goes into pretty excruciating detail about the way the israelis is targeted what's called washing infrastructure it's water sanitation hygiene and even in march we saw this in the hospital the hospital regularly had no water or the little water that it had had to be shunted to the operating room and the um uh uh icu's um the uh same thing with electricity but that's well known um you know the generators uh where the generators often ran out of fuel that we would know because all the lights went down because they only had the solar panels to work with that um so the this whole society is being eradicated down to its literally its roots i mean like i quite literally mean the food system has been destroyed uh the food production system not distributing uh aid from outside but you know this is one of the important ports of sarah rois book about de-development and gasa she just started the third edition of it describes how the the israelian military uh and then that's the game people should listen people should understand any time i say israel i mean the united states and it's real by default um but the israelis have destroyed gasa's food production system uh the eastern edge of gasa is completely unformable the western edge of gasa is the sea is uh people have been so limited in the uh fishing expeditions that they can do that they're basically useless now and the north has been completely emptied of its population so whole food and water systems have been destroyed it's just the whole thing it's just it's hard it's really hard to come up with words anymore to describe how severe and how extensive and how extreme uh this has been it was pretty bad on october six but it's really been you know pumped up to 11 since then yeah yeah um folks i hate to do that but we do need you to donate and um i just want to remind you that you want here this kind of uh conversation anywhere else really i'm definitely on um not on um mainstream media and um not on wisconsin public radio either you need w or t for these kinds of conversations and we need to see your support and really i don't want to play drop at all now i want to continue this conversation please just uh donate and and we'll announce you and and thank you um yara i want to get back to Paulio but before that if you want to um just react to what we heard here from for rose which is just you know like i said i can't take it but you know in the last 11 months there's so much i haven't been able to take and and you know it happens and we need to know about that i mean you know thanks to for rose and many other both international and uh palestinian physicians who have you know and sometimes harrowing circumstances told their stories publicly you know we have and this is honestly part of the traumatic and most devastating part of this we know exactly what's happening there have been so many cases individual cases um that we have you know heard over the past uh 11 months that i feel in any other context would mobilize such a major intervention at the very least condemnation and they've just they've they've their stories in the thousands you know i've heard such horrific stories about you know orphan children um who wake up in the hospital asking for their parents and for parents you know there was that story what in nine months ago at this point of parents who you know waited 10 years to have children via IVF only for their children to be killed every nightmare scenario any of us can imagine you know a father goes out to get bread for his kids he comes back to find his apartment destroyed i mean these are horror scenarios they're happening daily every single day and to me um as a palestinian it is a a explicit reminder of just how dehumanized palestinians are on the global stage and have been really for decades um they are portrayed and this is how these kinds of people ask how do we allow you know atrocities to happen this is how it's being told a narrative that an entire population is barbaric um is uncivilized is terroristic or the babies will be terrorists so essentially they're all the same and that they had it coming that they deserve it you know i write and speak a lot about this publicly and even now 10 11 months later i'm still getting comments like uh you know well they you know about when i speak about you know a famine case well they should have you know they need to release the hostages or they shouldn't have started a war they couldn't finish and we're so past the point of any pretense that this is about getting Hamas that this is about anything beside the wholesale destruction of the Gaza strip and the displacement uh and death of its people and you know we see that because what would be getting most headlines if this was not happening in Gaza is what's happening in the west bank which is another totally different type of terror people are terrified to leave their homes to leave the cities to leave the villages because settler terrorism is at insane rates um the settlers now that used to just harass you on the road which i have myself has experienced are now entering villages uh setting fire to villages putting flyers on people's cars warning of the second neckba um with soldiers standing nearby um we've seen so many videos um from the west bank of soldiers beating up unarmed people uh there was the the video you just noted from yesterday about um a video of people being thrown off roofs there was a case just last week in the west bank of a 16 year old girl who was in her home in a refugee camp shot in the head by an Israeli sniper and for decades all we've have been hearing every time a hospital is bombed every time a you know child is killed um that those are accidents but every other Palestinian killed is killed because they are a terrorist and those uh narratives have never been really widely challenged and in fact are enabled by many of the world's most powerful forces um the way that international humanitarian law has been absolutely decimated over this past year because of who the victims happen to be here and they are Palestinians and i think likely your listeners are well acquainted with this idea of you know that there are some populations that are seen as valued and some that are pariah populations nuisance populations and so any form of atrocity can be justified against them and that's what we're seeing and increasingly Israeli politicians you know the right wing especially ones that are most prominent right now they're they're telegraphing exactly what they want they want to seize Palestinian land and they want to remove the people that are on that land and every um indication in both occupied territories the Gaza Strip and the west bank including East Jerusalem is showing that that is proceeding um essentially unobstructed and it's really shocking especially considering you would even get you know toothless but at least some sort of rhetorical response in the past I mean US presidents it's hard to even believe now but as you know recently as George W. Bush would at least call for a settlement freeze or would you know criticize the wall we are to the point where it's it almost seems that the worse and more explicit Israelis the crimes of the Israeli military and settlers and government policies become the less pushback there is it's a very strange thing to witness in real time um so much has been documented on video there's been so many cases brought to the state department spokespeople who have become increasingly incoherent when it comes to responding about any of these issues it's it's if you don't even care about Palestinians what you should care about is what is being done to international humanitarian law and these these violations and these new technologies being deployed on Palestinians if we think that they are going to stay applied to Palestinians and not move on to whatever other pariah populations world powers deem then we are being incredibly naive and and that is exactly what will happen if we allow it yeah including within the united states I believe my guests are yara asi who you just heard she's assistant professor at the university of central florida in the school of global health management and informatics and co-director of the palestine pogum for health and human rights she's the author of how wall kills the overlooked threats to our health also with us is dr. ferro's cidwa a trauma surgeon at san huakin hospital in starkton california who was in gaza in uh march and april and uh practice there to the degree that uh practice is even a word that makes sense in this context uh folks we please need to heal from you we need to get your donations w w w w w w m.org so ferro's you said that 200 people came every day injured and and you know if you want to describe some of the injuries and and make me cry again that's okay but um and and you have what full full full operation operating rooms how do you decide in a situation like that what to do and who to take and who you're going to let die and and so on there are trauma surgeons and emergency medical personnel have worked out triage systems and other such things but i gotta be honest european also it was just a total chaotic situation um the uh it was challenging let's just say that the um the technical details probably don't matter but you know in the end we we did have i mean it's it's uh but it's it's true we did have women children and whoever uh lots of people come in um who came in breathing but we can see that they had injuries that we were not going to be able to do anything about um you know every day that i was there i saw a uh a child who had been shot in the head a new one um every single day now i'm not even the person they call for a child who's been shot in the head they called the neurosurgeon and then the kid just goes to the ICU so it was only if i happened to be in the um in the trauma bay when they when they came in or when i walked through the ICU later so i saw a fraction of the ones that actually um that actually arrived at the hospital yet every day i saw one it you know mass use is general hospital in in boston would have a hard time dealing with a a gunshot with the head of a child every day for then certainly for you know even just for two weeks straight let alone for a 10-11 month straight um it's just there's no um it's almost silly to talk about the uh like you said practice to the degree that practice was possible which is basically what any uh any normally developed teenagers could have done without many medical training rap wounds uh change bandages you know i did some surgeries there i helped some people there's no doubt about that but uh it was um well the way i've been thinking or the way i've been talking about it is to say that you know we could provide care at the individual level but not at the massive scale that it's needed you know the the people that i had access to that i could take to the OR that i you know like we we wrote a me and mark roman wrote a an article in a magazine called politico um about what we did there and uh uh we talked about uh a little run that jury nine-year-olds who just basically been flayed by this bomb that destroyed the house shoes in and we were able to take her from being in septic shock and dying to not being in septic shock and dying so that's good uh and now she's in egypt which is good too but she she quite literally needs 20 years of surgical care to to make her better uh her we had to shorten her left leg so that needs to be lengthened she needs free flaps uh which i know you don't know that is but she needs muscular free flaps taken she's the largest muscles in her back taken off and implanted into her buttock and her thigh um this is all extremely advanced surgical why i don't know how to do that many people do wonder or even sometimes two different fellowships to learn how to do that you need a pediatric i c u with advanced modalities there's just all sorts of stuff that needs to be uh available if these people are going to have any any chance at actual like a meaningful recovery and all of it there these things did exist at shiffa hospital maybe at run tc hospital for children uh but they're both going they're just like yara said even the hostels like like they've they've put a nice new facade on the outside of shiffa hospital but it's completely useless from the inside there's nothing there you know doctors don't just work with our hands we we need stuff um and just to uh if i can just say something about what yara said a minute ago you know even if you mentioned it i totally agree with you you mentioned even if you don't care about Palestinians or anything like that you should care about international humanitarian law i totally agree with you but i think we should also care about the soul of our own country you know the uh i went to the the um what's it called uh the uncommitted movement asked us to come and talk at the dnc um and what i said there was that i i just finished reading a book about uh the resurrection of slavery in the u.s. after world war i successfully moved here after the civil war and the the book paints a picture of how the south was just totally and utterly morally corrupted by this disgusting moral enterprise of trying to resurrect slavery even though it was quite obvious that slavery was wrong was illegal the north would oppose it uh so you know they to do this they had to really uh their own society just became this totally immoral uh place that just you couldn't can't imagine you know lying became a virtue as long as you're lying to the right person murdering the right person became a virtue beating the right person became a virtue torturing the right person became a virtue it's just absolutely outrageous and the same thing is happening here it just happens to be further away it's it's really hard to uh to understand it's it's just it's again it's hard to come up with words for it yeah um we had greg palesteal um last week to tell us about how this is coming back through um you know coming up with new laws and um just basically bringing back not quite slavery though we had the second guest on that very show and who was talking about how the carceral um system in this country is basically um slavery but um yeah you're right i think it's very important and i as an israeli american i'm watching both of my societies um uh going through you know fascism allowed accepted celebrated um it's it's it is very very difficult for rose thank you so much for um donating to the show on top of being here i really appreciate it and and uh for rose says happy to help and uh we need to will from the rest of you too um it's embarrassing to me that for rose um gave us money and you haven't so um wort fm.org please um support the station where you can hear these conversations that again you know i kind of hate to repeat myself but you seriously cannot hear it elsewhere um yara we i did want to get back to uh polio you said that the world was able to mobilize um so my question is first was it really did did all the kids in gaza get uh immunized and um tell us about the effort and also why it is so important and um is there really an outbreak we heard about one baby is it an outbreak currently are we likely to see one tell us the situation regarding polio and and perhaps other um transmiss transmissible diseases yeah so you know i i think and froze perhaps correct me if i'm wrong i think ultimately there were three children who developed paralysis um and there was at least one who i know got global headlines but i believe the world health organization in some reporting had indicated that there were two others now because of the deterioration of the conditions in gaza we cannot every number that comes out as an undercount so if we saw one or three children with paralysis there are undoubtedly other children who either got polio and you know fortunately did not develop paralysis or did and their parents simply could not get them to a health center or you know any number of of disruptions that would prevent that from being reported um so to my knowledge the vaccination campaign was incredibly successful more than half a million children young children were vaccinated initial reports because this was a multi-day campaign indicated that it actually went faster than expected at first because and i think we can imagine that parents in gaza now feel absolutely powerless to protect their children from essentially any threat whatsoever and so when there was at least this opportunity to receive the vaccine um many rushed to the facilities where they were able to get the vaccine because this was you know at least a small sliver of a chance to prevent at least one harm from befalling their child so this was a very multilateral effort this required a lot of coordination both from humanitarian organizations but also from israel permitting this and you know unfortunately it seems you know because polio is so contagious and so potentially detrimental that the reason that this was able to get such uh consensus that this was a priority is because it could potentially affect the region and then essentially the world there's a lot of international you know humanitarian workers going in and out of gaza israeli soldiers of course so uh any any outbreak of polio no matter how small if not immediately handled could become a regional and potentially wider issue very quickly and so i think although of course preventing polio in the children of gaza was a priority i think that ultimately this came from broader concerns about what could happen if this was not handled incredibly quickly um but you know polio is one of uh endless list of harms that could befall not just the children of gaza but anyone of any age group um you know we have seen that the world health organization has a dashboard uh that is tracking infectious disease across gaza again likely very under-counted you know numbers because it's just some of these are impossible and we've seen uh you know many infectious disease outbreaks from meningitis to hepatitis to you know many reports of children with diarrhea and bloody diarrhea which can be very lethal and we're a primary cause of death for children in gaza before october 7th um we're seeing all sorts of skin diseases rashes that are you know undiagnosed and untreated that um you know in any normal health system could be handled very quickly in gaza just spreads in these camps with these children that are so close together that have nowhere to go and nothing to do i mean some of the i mean skin rash doesn't sound like a big deal when you see pictures of some of these children who have lesions and marks across their entire body that are itchy and painful and you know they're alive right they're the lucky ones they're not counted among the dead so they're but they're still living these kind of really uh horrific lives and we're not seeing really significant intervention for that we've even heard reports that soaps and high hygienic products that could at least minimize some of that spread are being blocked by israel as well um so the situation in gaza if you wanted to create a case study for a medical textbook about how to spread infectious disease you would write exactly this um epidemiology is uh something we know very well about how especially these very common diseases spread that's why public health people both in gaza and outside have been warning about exactly this since you know a few weeks into this when it was clear that this was not going to be a short campaign as we've seen in the past but was going to be something extended especially as israel was cutting off you know water sanitation services um people are crowding it's a it's a it's a textbook uh you know way to induce infectious disease in a population that has no treatment really for many of them and uh you know it's uh it's going to cause uh as furrows i think alluded to earlier so much indirect mortality that we i think on the record will be seen as deaths from you know some health outcome but essentially it's a health outcome that stems directly from the deterioration of the military campaign um so these should be counted as battle related deaths even though they're not from bombings or not from snipers um but they are deaths that shouldn't have to happen same with people who have cancer who cannot leave to get their chemotherapy or people who have need you know heart surgeries or brain surgeries or any number of procedures that cannot get them they are all down to the same core reason and uh i just heard i think yesterday that the u.s the biden administration no longer sees that a ceasefire is even feasible before the election which i think many of us have predicted and so this is just going to continue and we're to the point now we're long past the point where a ceasefire this very second would this is a snowball that will just keep rolling uh for the foreseeable future and you cannot just put this genie kind of back in the bottle especially in terms of you know some of these children that have experienced malnutrition that will affect their growth forever their ability to learn their ability to um be physically and mentally healthy um we are this is a this will be an ongoing health catastrophe for months years generations past a ceasefire at this point and there is no ceasefire in sight it's only getting worse and it shocks me to say that because it's it's hard to imagine how it could get worse and yet we know that it will um it's it's you know as as we've said too many times on this call it's just a really completely human-made avoidable preventable uh situation that we're seeing that should not that should be seen as a humanitarian emergency because it is but should not be reduced to needing only humanitarian interventions this is uh this stems from long unaddressed political uh problems that the world has kind of tried to sweep under the rug especially since the Oslo Accords and you know we have been writing and and warning about exactly this happening and so to see it happen um is is is you know a daily a daily shock and reminder every time I open my phone uh and see social media yeah and of course killing by contagious diseases has been a tactic of colonizing uh people for a long time it's nothing new and now we are watching it in front of our eyes um I want to thank Beverly for uh her online donation I would love to see three mold donations before the end of the hours let in in the next seven minutes um and goodness I mean I could talk to the two of you for another three hours and and still have questions to ask but um let's go to um to to a couple questions maybe for Rose for you um Yara talked about people who have cancer and who are going to die of that because they cannot get treatment I heard you on Dr Perlmatter um in another um discussion where um I can one of you mentioned that there is talk among physicians about starting a registry um of people who are dying or will be dying of cancer just do to the materials in all these buildings that um that have been um bombed and uh I'm thinking also about the use of um basically um cancerous materials in um the all the armaments that are being used so um so that's one question another that um Yara also alluded to is I think that what was seen I mean obviously it is a genocide what was seen per se but also the way children are being targeted I mean you're talking about seeing at least one child with uh bullet ones to the head so that must be um children are targeted and we know that so many children have lost claims and like again like Yara said just this starvation and dehydration and so on um will affect them forever I'm thinking that probably also everyone who's in Gaza will end up with serious hearing issues from all of these bombing basically Israel and the United States are killing the next generations not just the generations that are alive right now in Gaza so choose what you want to respond to or if those other things you want to mention before we're done here we have only about five minutes left so yeah actually the when I mentioned the cancer registry it was actually to emphasize how devastated Gaza has been even from previous Israeli attacks and the long standing I think about 17 you're running blockade now um actually the the proposal for a cancer registry didn't come from me it came from mod skill bird in 2009 2009 and that was because of Israel's use of work called dime weapons during the uh the 2008 nine attack on Gaza operation cast led um dime weapons are uh no kind of weapon ear I don't really know but they're uh they're explosives that are aligned with a sort of tungsten casing that explodes and when it except I guess the listeners can't see what I'm doing with my hands but when it explodes it sends out a basically knee high or higher for an adult uh uh wave of tungsten of kind of super heated and thin tungsten that uh that cuts through uh flesh and bone it creates really incredible injuries um and there are studies from the uh from the United States where these things are obviously jointed adults with the Israeli military industries um about uh what weapons great tungsten does when it's implanted in the muscles of rats it kills all of them it kills them all with rabdomaya sarcoma that spreads very quickly so um you know these are uh these are serious issues obviously uh what you mentioned about the the devastation it's important to remember virtually every building in Gaza is damaged or destroyed I think about 60% of housing stock has been completely leveled um the uh the whole the whole place has just been leveled it looks like a nuclear bomb hit Gaza city and you click a nuclear bomb hit Khan Yunus and you click a nuclear bomb hit raffle like it you can see the pictures it's just utterly it's incredible so the that um and what uh uh the UN environment program and I think also uh undead the the UN uh trade something something um they've put out reports pointing out that actually the UN environment program put out a report saying that there's 107 kilos of rubble in Gaza for every square meter of the strip wow it's just incredible and then they pointed out I had no she thought about it until now or until I read it but they pointed out that this uh this detreus this this rubble is contaminated extensively with human remains extent probably with animals and stuff too but extensively with human remains extensively with unexploded ordnance and extensively with massive cavity that you know it's not like the houses in Gaza were built with organic materials or something they're you know it's all cement it's you know the uh I can only imagine what the situation is with kids with asthma with the induction respiratory diseases but again it just gets back to what we were saying before the massive destruction not just of that top tier of society the university is the nice things not just of that middle tier the hospitals the necessary things even down to the water and food infrastructure the housing infrastructure the you're talking about the ability of people to live inside and to eat that's what's been destroyed in Gaza it's not hard to see where this where that leads you know and that not just where it leads what it's doing right now you know you're right right now I can't I haven't read the last uh the most recent uh integrated food security phase classification report but the one from the the previous one in march said that there were 495 000 people in the catastrophic phase of food insecurity in Gaza that's more than there were in simalia in 2011 and simalia was 20 30 times bigger than Gaza it's it's crazy we have to work on our with it and before I rant too much about it let me just say that I think the the thing that we everybody I hope the thing that people will take away from this discussion is not just that the situation is dire yeah it's really really bad in fact there's there's certainly no similar uh thing that's been done to a population in my lifetime and honestly probably since World War II but we are the ones that are funding it so we can stop it we can stop it immediately it would take one phone call from Biden and he's not going to make that phone call and neither is Harris unless we you do everything in our power to stop to to force them to make that phone call and the instant they make that phone call it's done yeah well dr furrows sidwa and uh professor yara aci um thank you so very much for joining us thank you for the work that you're doing and uh onward yeah and uh we also got another uh donation from Barbara remember folks that these donations are being matched so thank you Barbara too for your donation and thanks to jade samel and lainey for their help today I am esti de nore we'll be talking again next week bye bye [Music] you're listening to WORT Madison stay tuned for melon floyd come and listen to 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