[Israeli] operations at Port-au-Prince field hospital concluded with military ceremony. Col. Itzik Kreis thanks team and civilians treated on spot. ‘There are no other nations with strength, willingness, dedication, determination to help in this way. (full article…)

A Palestinian taken by ambulance to a Jerusalem hospital was denied entry by hospital security, which may have been a factor in his death, according to a suit filed last week in the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court. (full article…)

Two members deferred their blather until after the break. Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, had asked his colleagues to limit their remarks, but keeping a senator quiet may be the only task harder than producing a healthcare reform bill. The first votes on any actual proposed amendments to the bill weren’t expected until after 6 p.m. (full article…)

Many elderly Las Vegas residents were alarmed and confused Wednesday after receiving a mailer with an enclosed letter signed by the Chief Medical Officer of Humana Medicare, Philip Painter, claiming that Congress and the President are considering proposals to cut “important benefits and services” of Medicare. (full article…)

Take Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, leader of the bipartisan “Gang of Six” spearheading the Finance Committee’s healthcare negotiations, and architect of that committee’s much anticipated healthcare legislation. He’s also one of the top five recipients of health industry-related money in Congress, pocketing $2.9 million in his career. (full article…)

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday. (more…)

More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient’s physician, are rejected by California’s largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation’s biggest state, according to data released Wednesday by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. (more…)

The only real solution %u2014 one that replaces the profit motive with actually keeping us healthy and operates in most civilized nations on the planet %u2014 has already been taken off the negotiating table by our government-corporate plutocracy, and that is a single-payer system.(more…)

You can download the 2009 Arab Human Development Report here – but if you do, I suggest that you spend more time reading it that the correspondents of Ha’aretz apparently did. I came across an editorial entitled, “It’s a sorry plight to be a citizen in many Arab states”—a self-styled distillation of the report’s findings… Yet while the report spent most of it’s time addressing the problems of human security in Iraq, Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zvi Bar’el of Ha’aretz includes only the following token reference to the conditions in Palestine:

The report notes that during the past seven years some 78,000 homes were demolished or damaged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The infrastructure suffered damage to the tune of $728 million. Economic growth during those years was negative, standing at minus 2.9 percent annually. About a fourth of the workforce in the territories is unemployed. Yearly per capita income stabilized at $1,178 in 2007, about a third less than in the peak year of 1999. (more…)

So who’s behind these terrible conditions? There’s no mention of Israel’s responsibility for any (let alone all) of this. In fact, there’s no mention of Israel in the entire article! Turning to the actual report, it quickly becomes clear why this is. Israel is identified again and again in the report as the primary cause of Palestine’s poor education, miserable infrastructure and generally awful humanitarian conditions. Just a few of the points that Ha’aretz was willing to ignore:

>>> “In … the Occupied Palestinian Territory … people’s basic rights to self-determination and peace have been forcibly annulled. They face threats to their lives, freedom, livelihoods, education, nutrition, health and physical environment from outside forces whose presence wreaks institutional, structural and material violence on them every day” (p. 14).

>>> “Palestinian farmers suffer because Israeli settlers monopolize most ground water sources” (p. 49).

>>> “Food conditions have deteriorated for most Palestinians, but those in Gaza are particularly affected as a result of Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods and persons and as a result of the blockade (p. 126).

>>> “Most threats to Palestinian human security come from Israeli forces” (p. 170).

>>> “Forty one years of occupation, as well as the expansion of Israeli settlements, have prevented Palestinians from controlling their own affairs, and render illusory any notion of the economy as a means of meeting their most basic needs” (p. 177).

>>> “A 2003 World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy two years after the Al Aqsa intifada noted a sharp decline in all major economic indicators … The report added that the chief cause of the Palestinian crisis was
Israel’s blockade” (p. 178).

>>> “The Palestinians have paid a heavy price for exercising their democratic
rights via the ballot box” as Israeli punishment for electing Hamas has taken the form of “a total blockade, obstructing all communication with the outside world for whatever purpose” (p. 179).

>>> “In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the absence of a budget in 2006 and the Western boycott of the Palestinian government caused an acute educational crisis” (p. 182).

Gaza: No right to life

After four pages filled with detailed charts of the number of grams and calories of every type of food to be permitted for consumption by Gaza residents (broken down by gender and age), comes this recommendation: “It is necessary to deal with the international community and the Palestinian Health Ministry to provide nutritional supplements (only some of the flour in Gaza is enriched) and to provide education about proper nutrition.” Printed in large letters at the end of the document is this admonition: “The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical for the prevention of the development of malnutrition.” (more…)

The years of closed borders has severely crippled Gaza’s health sector, denying patients vital medicines, replacement parts for hospital equipment, access to outside medical care, and preventing the entrance of outside expertise. Moreover, Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was devastated during Israel’s three week assault on Gaza (December 2008-January 2009), making the treatment of patients within the tiny coastal territory near impossible. (more…)

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002. (more…)

However, a power struggle between Fatah and Hamas over the issuance of exit permits for patients, and Israel’s reluctance to issue visas for Gazans on the basis of alleged security, means Mohammed has to now wait for a new permit to return to the Israeli hospital. (more…)

Israeli authorities transferred ailing 60-year-old detainee Ahmad Al-Qiq from the Ar-Ramlah Hospital to the Ofer Detention Center near Ramallah despite the move meaning he can no longer receive adequate care, his family said Monday. (more…)

Israel may have deliberately attacked sewage infrastructure

It is hard to think of another place in the world where life is ruled by such cruel absurdities. Hamas, Israel and Fatah are all playing with the lives and well-being of these patients, including 57 children from Gaza who need to complete complex, expensive treatments at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Their health is now hanging by a thread. The bombing of Gaza has almost stopped, but the war against the people goes on, from all sides. (more…)

My friend and former colleague, writing from Gaza.

Discriminatory and unfair division of the shared water sources creates a chronic water shortage in the West Bank. Average per capita daily water consumption of Palestinians in the West Bank is two-thirds of the amount recommended by the World Health Organization. Due to the shortage, many Palestinians have to buy water from tankers at three to six times higher than regular prices, forcing poor families to spend up to one-fifth of their income on water, compared to the slightly more than one percent that average-income Israeli families spend on water. (more…)

Medics and ambulance drivers said they were targeted when they tried to tend to the wounded. Sixteen of them were killed. According to the World Health Organisation, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 44 clinics were damaged by Israeli bombs. Two clinics were destroyed. In one incident, paramedics were fired on by a tank using a shell filled with 8,000 lethal metal darts as they were carrying a wounded man to an ambulance. (more…)

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR) said Israel attacked 34 medical care facilities and prevented Palestinian medical teams from reaching the wounded during the offensive in December and January. (more…)

They taught us to dread zarchan [from the Hebrew root to shine or glow]. They taught us, as medics, that if we treated a phosphorous wound, prepare for the worst. It doesn’t merely burn, they taught us, it burns first through the skin, then through the soft tissue, until it reaches bone. They taught us to take an instrument, or, in its absence, a stick, to dig out the phosphorus crystals from the flesh, or the burning would go on and on. (more…)

I went to the burns department in Shifa hospital. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. These phosphorus burns. Their bodies were black. One person has stitches everywhere. It’s worse than killing people. They look like the living dead. I also went to the north, to Beit Lahiya. This was one of the most beautiful areas of farmland. Now it’s gone, you can’t recognise the place. I wanted to cry. (more…)

“That in 2009 they have people in need of help from a doctor and we can go to help and they won’t let us; this is crazy,” he added. (more…)

“I am appealing to political leaders here and in the region and the world to get their act together and stop this,” he said, speaking at Gaza’s largest hospital. “They are responsible for these deaths.” (more…)

“Many people died while they were waiting to enter the operating rooms. Some died in the lobby of the hospital waiting to enter the reception area,” said Hussein Ashor, the hospital’s director. “There were not enough beds, so we pulled out the curtains and lay them on the ground, and we put patients on the curtains. The floor of the reception was covered with blood.” (more…)

Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

“This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality,” I was told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders this past summer. “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.” (more…)

“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.” (more…)

During the last two days of August, the Egyptian authorities permitted approximately 3,300 people to cross the Gazan border at Rafah into Egypt ‘for humanitarian reasons’.

Those who entered Egypt included Gazan patients, students, and an undisclosed number of Egyptians who had been stranded inside the Gaza Strip. The sight of more than fifty busloads of travelers heading out of Gaza may have given the impression that movement restrictions are finally easing inside the Gaza Strip. But almost 900 other Gazans on board the buses were turned back at the border. Amongst them was twenty year old Nevin Abu Taima from Rafah – who is still desperately trying to return to the US in order to resume her political science degree.

‘My family lives in the Brazil refugee camp, in [the south of] Rafah’ she says. ‘Our house was destroyed by the Israelis in 2005, and we spent the next six months living in a local UNRWA school. We are a big family of eleven children, and some of my brothers and sisters also have families of their own – all of us were living together in one classroom. Can you imagine that?’ (more…)

It’s a very negative signal that the International Quartet Envoy Tony Blair’s planned trip to the Gaza was cancelled yesterday, Tuesday 15th July, following what was described as “specific security threats that made the visit impossible”.

As a delegation of the European Parliament we visited, last June, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. Our visit in Gaza was perfectly coordinated by UNRWA, and we didn’t feel any sort of insecurity, but only despair and responsibility looking at the living conditions of the Palestinian population under an illegal siege (don’t worry we also went to see the danger and the damages of the rockets fired on Sderot).

I really hope that the Israeli authorities’ pressures or other forces are not behind this decision by Tony Blair not to go to Gaza Strip, using the threat of security in order to prevent to witness the disaster of the blockade.

Palestinians, both in West Bank and in Gaza Strip, deplored the fact that Tony Blair had never visited the Strip, despite of the duties related to his role as Quartet Representative that include mobilizing international assistance to the Palestinians, working closely with donors and others, as well as helping to implement plans and concrete projects aimed to promote Palestinian economic development. (more…)

What better way to punish Hamas than by punishing Gazan students?

The American State Department recently withdrew the Fulbright Grants for Gazan students hoping to pursue higher education opportunities in the United States. And on what grounds?

Well, it seems that because Israel isn’t letting them out anyway, it’s better not to waste money on students condemned to a future of imprisonment. The politics of accomodation work yet again, but this time the hopes of seven talented students have been drastically crushed by this moral cowardice.

True, the money can be used elsewhere, but why not take a moral stand against the collective punishment of Gaza? First, there is no guarantee of Israel policy regarding Gaza and simply assuming that Israel will never allow these students to leave the Strip is tantamount to supporting Israeli oppression in the first place. (more…)

JABALYA, Gaza, Jan 21 (Reuters) – Ready to act fast to save his life, Maher Al-Assali’s young siblings stand at his bedside, poised to pump air through a hole in the 12-year-old’s neck when the ventilator that keeps him alive cuts out.

Since being paralysed in a car accident seven years ago, Assali has depended on a mechanical ventilator to supply his lungs with oxygen. During the electricity blackouts that have plagued the impoverished territory for months, his family used to hook the machine up to a generator at a nearby clinic.

But Israel has cut fuel supplies to Hamas-run Gaza as part of sanctions it says are meant to stop militants firing rockets across the border. The clinic generator has shut down. So now, when the power grid fails, Assali’s family keep him alive with a rubber hand pump. (more…)

It is supposed that one can build factual perception by reading the statistics and getting all the hard evidence, but I recently realized that a complete cognitive process relies first and foremost on visuals — seeing the picture for oneself.

I joined a camera crew and producer shooting footage for a first-person interview on the Israeli siege on Gaza. The interviewee was Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, head of the Palestinian International Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, a coalition of organizations and individuals set out to do just that. We met with Dr. Sarraj at his office and booked him for the day. Based on his humanitarian activism with the campaign, Dr. Sarraj would determine which areas were most pressing in terms of the crisis in Gaza, and therefore deserved priority over other aspects during the short interview. Dr. Sarraj confirmed what the producer and the rest of the crew had already mentioned — when it came to crisis in Gaza, the health sector and the economic sector were at the top of the list. It was decided we would visit a couple of hospitals and a factory to shoot the right footage. This is where the cameraman started taping and didn’t stop till the end of the day. (more…)

Mona El-Farra is an inspiring individual. This modest and unassuming woman seems to have innumerable projects up her sleeve, ranging from her physician work at the Gazan branch of the Palestine Red Crescent Society to her role as Health Development consultant with the Union of Health Workers Committee.

On her website profile, Ms. El-Farra writes that she is “… a physician by training, a human rights and women’s rights activist by practice.” To her credit, she has the experience to back it up. Not only has Ms. El-Farra directly worked to improve the situation in Gaza through her physician work, she has also toured the United States advocating for human rights in Palestine, appearing at venues as diverse as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! and various American university campuses.

I first came across Ms. El-Farra in 2006, when I discovered her blog: From Gaza, With Love. Since then, I have followed her blog journey, though the frustration of military occupation and the devastating realities of everyday life in Gaza… and I was delighted to interview her the other night. (more…)