More Food for Thought...

Originally, my plan was to go back to school and get my PhD in English.  However, as life would have it, I continued to get drawn back into what was happening in our community.  I started my MPH concentrating in Mental Health (I am about a quarter of the way through the program).  Basically, I went back to school to help address and solve issues that are going on here.  I am also very much drawn to Global Health and how people as a whole throughout the world are treated.  As someone entering into the Public Health realm, I have to remove personal bias and deal with the reality of circumstances.  I am religiously Jewish but a mix of everything. I wrote a short paper for my Global Health course on the Israel/Palestine conflict and the humanitarian crisis it has created.  At the end of the day, if we are not here for each other; we have nothing.

The conflict in Israel/Palestine (or Israeli Occupied Territory: whichever way you see it) has been going on for centuries and escalated again at the end of World War II.  Many Jews were left without a home having survived the war and concentration camps and ended up on ships off the coast of Palestine.  Palestine was a British territory.  Through the roles of the United Nations and Britain, land from Palestine was designated to the Jews, escalating a centuries-old conflict.  Jews already lived in Palestine in the cities of Tel Aviv and Sefad, to name a couple.  Being Jewish (Reconstructionist; I am a mix) and having been to Israel, I wish I had been to the West Bank and Gaza to see first-hand what is happening.  There is a humanitarian crisis.  The amount of poverty in Gaza and the West Bank is astounding and Israel does not allow enough aid to reach the people of those territories.  When missiles are launched from Israel to Gaza, civilian casualties do occur.  Israel does have warning sirens, but in all honesty, where do the people of Gaza have to go?  It is a densely populated area that already lacks proper resources.  Just in Gaza, tens of thousands of people are homeless and almost half a million are without running water (Cocking, 2009).  Without running water, we run into public health issues of sanitation and infectious diseases. 

It is the job of those in public health to assess what risk factors can occur and see what can be done to minimize them.  This is a chronic humanitarian crisis that seems to have no end because negotiations run stale and cease-fires do not last long enough to get adequate supplies into Gaza and the West Bank.  The World Health Organization discusses some factors that play a role: poverty, little opportunities for employment, the unreliable water and energy resources, very restricted movement in and out of Gaza and limited access to healthcare (WHO: Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2015).  At times, Palestinians must go to hospitals in East Jerusalem due to “equipment exhaustion, limited technical capacity and the chronic shortages of medicines and medical disposables”.  They are only able to leave Gaza for treatment if it is approved by Israel and that is not always the case.  The health care infrastructure has been compromised in this conflict.  The unemployment rate is at 27% and the unemployment rate among the youth is at 60% (The World Bank: West Bank and Gaza, 2015).  The conflict during July and August of 2014 resulted in 2,251 Palestinian death and only 73 on the Israeli side.  The conflict resulted in about 6,000 air strikes on Gaza and the destruction of about 18,000 dwellings.  This situation is unique in that public health professionals are extremely limited in the access that is given due to the conflict.  The territory is isolated and controlled and it seems that people within Gaza and the West Bank would have to take the public health role on themselves. 

The World Bank gives the following statistics of Gaza and the West Bank.  The population of just under 4.3 million and as of 2011, 25.8% of that population lives in poverty (The World Bank: West Bank and Gaza, 2015).  The life expectancy at birth is 73, which to be honest is much higher than I had anticipated given not only the physical conditions that they must endure, but the mental health conditions that face the people of Gaza and the West Bank.   According to the Palestinian government, the suicide rate increased 68.4% in 2014 (Palestine News Network, 2015).  The population in Gaza is higher than the population of the West Bank, yet the West Bank sees a higher suicide rate than Gaza.  Prior to the conflict in the summer of 2014, the economic growth was at 6%, then slowed to 2% after the conflict (The World Bank: West Bank and Gaza, 2015).  This conflict also caused over $2 billion in damages and Israel has withheld clearance revenues that should have been distributed to Palestine since January of this year.  These revenues account for about 70% of Palestine’s annual revenue.

  

References

BBC. (2015, June 22). Retrieved from Gaza conflict 2014: 'War crimes by both sides' - UN: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-33223365

Cocking, J. (2009, January 29). Need Not Politics. Retrieved from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/29/gaza-israel-conflict-oxfam

Palestine News Network. (2015, June 21). Retrieved from Rise of suicide rates: Gaza youngster strangles himself Saturday: http://english.pnn.ps/2015/06/21/rise-of-suicide-rates-25-year-old-from-gaza-strangles-himself/

The World Bank: West Bank and Gaza. (2015, September 16). Retrieved from The World Bank: http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/westbankandgaza/overview

WHO: Occupied Palestinian Territory. (2015, June). Retrieved from World Health Organization: http://www.emro.who.int/pse/palestine-news/who-hosts-donor-roundtable-to-discuss-health-barriers-in-gaza-june-2015.html