Endless Airstrikes Push Gazan Hospitals Hammered by COVID to the Brink
▻https://www.thedailybeast.com/endless-airstrikes-push-gazan-hospitals-besieged-by-covid-to-the-brin
Gaza’s health-care system has long been plagued with shortages in medical supplies, doctors, electricity, and a crumbling infrastructure. The pandemic was particularly hard on Gaza’s roughly 2 million residents, with researchers saying that infection rates are vastly underreported, and that Israel’s siege on the enclave had exacerbated the #COVID crisis even further.
“Israel’s blockade has devastated the economy in #Gaza,” one researcher from European University Institute in Florence told Al-Jazeera in February. “And this is having a major impact on the ability of people to comply with lockdown measures when doing so means losing their already limited sources of income.”
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Adding to the COVID crisis in Gaza is a lagging #vaccination rate. Although Israel’s vaccine campaign was one of the most successful in the world, less than one percent of Palestinians have been fully vaccinated. Israeli officials have faced a barrage of criticism for failing to extend their vaccine efforts to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The current violence sweeping the region, with Israeli airstrikes pummeling building after building—and the Hamas militant group firing hundreds of rockets back at Israel—has killed at least 83 Gazans, including 17 children. On the Israeli side, five civilians have died.