Can Gaza fight COVID-19?

By: Abdulaziz Abu Zayed

Thousands of victims of COVID-19 perish daily. The disease has affected, in historic fashion, the economic climate and the various patterns of social life — above all at the disease's current epicentre in the United States and Europe, which possess health systems considered the strongest in the world, despite their present inability to deal with the disease effectively. This shortfall in capacities cannot be compared with what the hospitals and health cadres suffer in the developing countries — above all here in Palestine, amid occupation and blockade and the absence of financial safety nets and the economic capacity to fight the disease's repercussions, which have reached every side of life.

The relief agency (UNRWA) announced three years ago that Gaza would be unliveable by 2020 — though it was already unfit for life by the standards of health, water, education, work, and the rest. The greatest danger lies in the near-paralysis afflicting the health sector in Palestine, and in the Gaza Strip in particular, where the Israeli blockade and the Palestinian division contribute to the shortfall in the funding, support, equipping, and maintenance of health facilities. Gaza has a rate of 6 hospital beds per 10,000 citizens, compared with more than 33 beds for the same number in Italy and 46 beds in Switzerland. Beyond the shortage of beds, the pharmacy shelves inside the hospitals remain empty of many medicines and even basic medical solutions — some citizens are asked to buy what they need of these medicines from pharmacies outside the hospital, for their scarcity and unavailability. Even the medical cadre — doctors, nurses, and others — have been deprived of receiving their full salaries for many years, and the occupation and the closure of the crossings bar them from receiving trainings and travelling abroad except in a handful of cases.

The number of corona cases in Palestine reached 217 today, 12 of them in Gaza among arrivals through the Rafah crossing and the Beit Hanoun (Erez) checkpoint. Arrivals to Gaza have been placed since the middle of last month in compulsory quarantine centres for 14 days — 35 quarantine centres distributed across the Strip's different areas from north to south, in hospitals, schools, clinics, and even some private residences. While quarantine contributes fundamentally to strengthening the first line of defence against the spread of corona in Gaza, it needs increasing supplies of test kits, of which only 1,200 have entered Gaza — insufficient for the tests needed to ensure the safety of those leaving quarantine and to follow the condition of the infected at the field hospital near the Rafah crossing.

The Israeli rights organisation Gisha, specialised in defending Palestinians' right to freedom of movement, called in an urgent letter addressed to the Israeli defence ministry and the coordinator's office for the blockade on the Strip to be lifted immediately, to guarantee food security and prevent an economic collapse in Gaza. Many local and international bodies have likewise issued appeals to lift the blockade, continuing for more than 13 years on the Gaza Strip, to salvage matters before their complete collapse — which serves the interest of no party.

Under the state of emergency President Mahmoud Abbas declared, and which was extended, the educational institutions, places of worship, commercial markets, and some vegetable markets remain closed — replaced by dedicating scattered areas in several quarters to compensate for the closure of the central markets for selling basic foodstuffs. Many companies and civil-society institutions likewise resorted to closing their offices partially or fully, moving to work from home over the internet — which posed a further challenge to the electricity and internet distribution companies to increase the hours of electricity supply and expand the internet networks' capacity to handle the increased demand as employees and students turned to the internet to perform their usual work. The state of emergency also affected other sectors, such as transport, which previously relied on the movement of students and employees between and within the governorates, and the private sector, many of whose establishments were compelled to let workers go or cut working hours so as to keep operating while complying with the government decisions. This worsened the economic conditions of Palestinians in Gaza, where youth unemployment exceeded 75% before the current crisis — threatening their future and warning of grave consequences: rising crime rates, many young people turning to religious extremism, and other problems of far-reaching effect.

Some consumer-goods factories in the Karni industrial zone remain at work, at doubled production capacity to produce medical protective supplies — the factory providing most of the hospitals' and quarantine centres' need of masks and protective suits for medical cadres and patients. But these factories' work depends on the availability and entry of raw materials through the Strip's crossings, on which Israel has imposed intensive restrictions since 2007.

As we have seen in many countries, the virus's first wave was confined to cases arriving from abroad, infected through mixing with other travellers or carriers of the disease in the countries they came from. The infection's escape from the quarantine centres, through mixing with others in society outside them, carries grave repercussions on all the foregoing fronts — in addition to the unavailability of ventilators, which can save patients' lives by supporting the respiratory functions the disease strikes in its most dangerous stages. The number of such machines in Gaza is 62, of which only 20 are not already in use by other patients not infected with the coronavirus — and some machines are unusable for being broken and needing unavailable spare parts.

Will the Gaza Strip be able to face the global pandemic with the least losses under these conditions? Will the government's measures in Gaza prevent the disease's spread beyond the quarantine centres? Will the professional bodies provide, and all parties bear, their various responsibilities toward the Gaza Strip's residents? And what is the fate of those without income, and of the Palestinian travellers stranded abroad who lost their jobs and sources of income because of the global crisis? Does social distancing seem a logical, implementable solution where 2 million citizens are packed into a geographic patch of no more than 365 square kilometres?

Everyone must bear their responsibilities to keep the crisis from worsening and reaching catastrophic limits: citizens must keep to their homes as far as possible and cancel all forms of gathering; the occupation and the international community must lift the blockade on the Gaza Strip immediately; and the government bodies must continue the serious, strict measures to guarantee society's safety and to compensate for the slowing of the national economy's wheel by supporting citizens through urgent economic-support packages for all sectors and workers until the current crisis ends.