This New Year's Eve, we devote our show to Gaza’s medical crisis in face of Israel’s genocidal assault on hospitals and clinics, basic infrastructure, and medical personnel. The unconscionable death toll in Gaza, which since October 7 alone has reached 21,000, is still steadily climbing, with daily reports of further mass killings by Israeli forces. It grows increasingly clear that Israel’s occupying forces are incapable of reaching their goal of eradicating Hamas as a fighting force, let alone as a political entity, and despite Netanyahu’s preposterous aim to “deradicalize” Palestinians, pronounced in the Wall Street Journal last week, their bloody campaign has only achieved the further radicalization of Palestinians and their supporters globally. The recognition grows steadily across the world that it is Israel that needs to be demilitarized and its radical fascistic right wing deradicalized: only the end of decades of Israeli apartheid and ethnic supremacism has any hope of bringing a just path to Palestinian liberation and any prospect of peaceful coexistence.
This year had already seen Israel’s violent incursions into the West Bank refugee camp, Jenin, and the expropriation by settlers of Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem. Since October 7, the steady toll of Palestinian deaths, dispossession, and arrests across the whole of historic Palestine, including ‘48, continues to rise and thousands of Palestinians have been seized as hostages by Israeli forces. We should not forget that no apartheid regime or settler colony ever survives without extreme violence. But while Israel seems able only to kill and destroy, the resistance of the colonized and their determination to carry on the struggle for liberation and decolonization never ceases and constantly finds new forms of cultural and political expression.
Nonetheless, we cannot forget that the toll taken by Israel’s brutal and genocidal assault on Gaza includes not only those killed by its bombs and tank shells, but also those maimed, scarred, burned, and traumatized by all they have had to witness. Beyond the 21,000 dead, buried now in mass graves, all too often without even the right to be mourned, over 55,000 Palestinians, and probably more than can be counted during the ongoing assault, have been wounded in a territory where virtually all the hospitals have been made inoperable by Israeli siege, bombing, or denial of essential services, including medication, power and clean water.
We discuss with our guest, Dr. Jess Ghannam, the current medical and psychological situation in Gaza and the likely impact of Israel’s infliction of mass death, starvation, and the collapse of the health system on current and future generations. What will one of the worst public health crises the world has ever seen mean for Gazan Palestinians’ recovery once this exorbitant phase of Israel’s “hundred year war on Palestine” is over? What has been the impact of witnessing the slaughter of a civilian population on Palestinians in other parts of Palestine and in the diaspora? What will it take to rebuild Gaza’s medical system in the context of Israel’s intentional and systematic destruction not only of hospitals and clinics, but of the whole civil infrastructure of the strip?
Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry & Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities & the psychological & psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. He also does research in the area of Global Health and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder & has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.
Please consider donating to the organizations Dr. Ghannam recommends, which have people on the ground in Gaza:
Kinder USA: //www.kinderusa.org/
Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net/
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free