Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

My mother has been a hypertension patient for the past 25 years. Ever since her initial diagnosis, she has adhered strictly to her prescribed medication. Yet since the genocide broke out, her medicine gradually ran out until it vanished from the markets altogether, with no clinic, pharmacy, warehouse, or stockpile left untouched by the shortage.

Eventually, my mother was forced to redraw her therapeutic map around two alternative drugs with relatively similar efficacy to the one she had lost. The doses were measured carefully according to her condition. But the fear of losing the medication again grew on her, so she began rationing her doses, taking half a pill instead of a full one, to make them last longer.

Although the ceasefire that followed was supposed to allow the unhindered influx of humanitarian aid and life-saving medical supplies at scale, it proved to be nothing but another trap. My mother went to collect her monthly prescription, only for the pharmacist to tell her that this would likely be the last refill, as the medication had already been depleted.

This is not an isolated plight endured only by my mother, but the status quo for 350,000 chronic patients in Gaza whose health, like hers, hangs in the balance, conditioned on the fluctuating status of the borders.

Faced with a shattered health care system, patients’ survival is dependent on Israel’s tightening restrictions on border crossings. The World Health Organization has warned that Israeli forces are no longer only claiming people’s lives through bombs, but are also endangering Palestinians by denying them urgently needed health care services and medication.

Lacking Proper Sanitation, Gaza’s Tent Camps Are Being Overrun by Rodents

Israel is willfully violating international law, which obligates the occupying power to maintain health care services, not undermine them nor use them as a bargaining chip.

Dr. Ahmad Al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital, described the ongoing crisis as “the worst period ever of depletion of medical supplies,” stressing that it even far outweighed the medicine shortage Gaza had witnessed earlier during the genocide. “It is the worst ever,” he emphasized.

Hospitals have become “nothing more than hollow cement blocks, stripped from the very core they were built for: medical services.”

Hospitals have become “nothing more than hollow cement blocks, stripped from the very core they were built for: medical services.”

He condemned the use of the word “ceasefire,” stating, “We are nearly 900 days into a war despite the one-sided truce.” He pointed to more than 2,400........

© Truthout