The Gaza Crisis: How Many Palestinians have We Lived? Paul Spiegel, the Center for Humanitarian Health, MD, a Physician and Epidemiologist
WHO estimates more than 17,000 Palestinians have lost their lives since the war began, including at least 7,700 children. The global health body has reported that more than one million people have been internally displaced. Humanitarian organizations warn that the trickle of aid entering Gaza since the conflict began is staggeringly insufficient to meet the enormous need.
“This is the largest humanitarian response in UNRWA’s nearly 75-year history and it’s very different than any other conflict or war that we’ve had to manage,” says Touma.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry at least 17,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 46,000 were wounded in Israel’s air and ground campaign. It came in response to the deaths of 1200 people in a Hamas attack on southern Israel.
Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is a physician and epidemiologist who spent decades working in such war-torn countries as Afghanistan and Ukraine. He says that in Gaza, “there are many unique aspects to it, which makes it so difficult.”
“Maybe 100 per day, sometimes none,” says Spiegel, a Cairo-based aid worker who works with international groups.
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The man said he escaped from fighting in the north of Gaza by going to the second-largest city, Khan Younis. When that city became the focus of fighting in recent days, Shannan came to Rafah.
UNRWA had a plan for 50 shelters to temporarily house 150,000 people if there was a war, says Touma.
More than half of Gaza’s population, 1.2 million people, are at 150 shelters run by the agency. And most of the people are crammed into about one-quarter of the territory, less than 40 square miles, Touma says.
“So our teams are stretched to the limit,” she says. Our capacities are not enough. We are overwhelmed. This is seven or eight times more [people] than we have planned for and three times as many facilities.”
Nufuz Shaban el Ghoof told NPR he was told to move south after he arrived in Rafah from the Khan Younis area.
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Instead, the fighting has caused “a constant displacement [of people] with no safe zones,” Spiegel says. “And probably the most unique component is that there is no escape valve.”
There are no places to go with fighting to the north, Israel to the east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the closed border with Gaza in the south.
“You’ve got this massive fighting and massive bombardment in a small contained area, and there’s just no space for people to move and flee and for the humanitarian organizations to respond,” he says.
The head of operations for Doctors Without Borders said that in a couple of days the group came under direct Israeli fire.
On Nov. 18, personnel displaying the MSF logo — the abbreviation for the group’s French name — on vehicles’ hoods, backs and doors “came face-to-face with an Israeli tank, and a soldier shot at them,” Lacharité says.
Israel’s military has not addressed the MSF attacks directly but has said that it “recognizes the importance of the special protections given to medical teams under international humanitarian law and takes action to prevent harm to them.”
The World Health Organization’s executive board decided to protect the health care in Gaza and to seek unfettered travel of humanitarian and medical assistance on Sunday, just a week after a fragile truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed.
“I think we all agree that this is a meeting we would rather not be having,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in his opening address.
The adoption of the resolution came after a full day of speeches by representatives from dozens of countries. While the U.S. tried to distance itself from certain elements of the resolution, including language around calls for a cease-fire, it did not attempt to block it.
During remarks made early in the day, Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations in Geneva, said “Today’s session is the only session ever convened here in Geneva on a specific conflict,” pointing to the wars in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. Is the world’s relationship with Israel different from that of the victims of those conflicts?
The World Health Organization said at least 499 attacks on health care in Gaza and the West Bank have taken place since the conflict began two months ago. The enclave has 36 hospitals but 13 of them are currently functional. Due to the conflict and everyday health needs, this diminished capacity comes at a time when medical demand is overwhelming. More than 180 women are giving birth in Gaza each day, according to the WHO.
The UN Security Council’s vote for a cease-fire failed on Friday after the U.S. vetoed it. At Sunday’s meeting, a number of countries spoke in favor of a cease-fire. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed on Sunday, so the delegation from Barbados said that health is a human right.
Once the resolution was adopted at the end of the day, there was sustained applause. Tedros said that the first consensus resolution on the conflict had been achieved by those who had gathered.
Without a cease-fire, humanitarian assistance at the scale needs is simply not possible, but he said that he was committed to follow through on the resolution.