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Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council webinar: The destruction of health care in Gaza and the scientific assessment of settler colonial violence

first published in Mondoweiss

The June 29, 2024 webinar organized by the Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council, “The destruction of healthcare in Gaza: A scientific assessment of settler-colonial violence,” hosted a distinguished panel that established important framing and outlined data on the genocide in Gaza. 

Dr. Bram Wispelwey, co-director of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights at the FXB Center for Health & Human Rights at Harvard University, discussed the epidemiological frameworks for disease distribution, morbidity, and mortality, with the goal of creating knowledge to relieve and eliminate health inequities. He explored the settler colonial determinants of health, the racialization and hierarchy that is created such that settlers can dominate and eliminate indigenous native populations, the U.S. and Israel being well-known examples. He saw the upswing in censorship on Palestine as a discursive force of war, the intensity reflecting the weakness in the anti-Palestinian position, and urged protestors in the U.S. to continue pushing for a change in the Palestine/Israel narrative. 

Dennis Kunichoff, with an MPH in biostatics, works as a data analyst at FXB with Dr. Wispelwey. Mr. Kunichoff focuses on using data to explain critical inequities in the country. He reviewed the use of satellite imagery of Gaza to gather reliable on-the-ground information and the changes that can be scientifically observed over time. Using publicly available data on the locations of humanitarian facilities, health care and educational institutions, and water facilities, and overlapping these with satellite documentation of bombings and the destruction of infrastructure, he demonstrated that the clustering of damage from Israeli assaults was not random, that the sites of attacks and the use of 2,000-pound bombs in the first six weeks of the war were clustered over the civilian infrastructure listed above. 

Dr. Sawsan Abdulrahim, Professor of Public Health at the American University of Beirut and a visiting fellow at the FXB Palestine Program for Health & Human Rights, discussed the critical history of UNRWA and the Israeli government’s attacks on the agency as one of the main providers of primary healthcare for Palestinian refugees. Because 75-80% of Gaza are refugees and rely on UNRWA for services and aid, the attacks on UNRWA are attacks on Palestinian existence. Netanyahu’s false claims that UNRWA is infiltrated by Hamas are part of a long history of Israeli attempts to eliminate the agency. In Gaza, UNRWA is indispensable, and has the infrastructure to provide food aid and health services; it is also the main provider of education for refugee children. The majority of the schools in Gaza have been destroyed by Israeli attacks, 193 UNRWA staff killed, and over half of UNRWA premises destroyed. Additionally, UNRWA is blocked by Israeli forces from certain areas, trucks carrying aid are obstructed, and the aid itself is targeted. UNRWA is also indispensable for stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Dr. Abdulrahim argued that Israeli attacks on UNRWA sites and staff are part of a plan to destroy the possibility of life and to provoke forced displacement for Palestinians. 

Dr. A. Kayum Ahmed, a South African activist-scholar, discussed the international legal framework. Drawing on Palestinian music, art, and poetry, he explored how the Palestinian body has become the site for human rights violations and resistance. International human rights law established the right to health, cultural, civil, and political rights, criminal law, and the conventions on the crime of apartheid and genocide. The framework was ironically established in 1948, the same year as the Nakba. Rooted in colonialism with colonial powers dominating the UN, IHL has not succeeded in preventing the Gaza genocide. In fact, international laws have been flaunted by Israel. Dr. Ahmed proposed a Nakba framework that overlaps with apartheid and genocide, with Zionism as Nakba’s ideological counterpart. He noted that these frameworks are not static; there are new social determinants of health like housing and water, and mental health is now included under the right to health. 

The webinar was moderated by Noga Shalev and the Q&A was moderated by Alice Rothchild. 

For the journal article on the scientific use of satellite imagery, please see: 

‘Nowhere and no one is safe’: spatial analysis of damage to critical civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the Israeli military campaign, 7 October to 22 November 2023.

We encourage you to watch the entire webinar at  The destruction of healthcare in Gaza: A scientific assessment of settler-colonial violence.

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