Tag: Gaza health officials

Watch | ‘Medical Community Can’t Ignore Politics of Israel-Gaza Conflict’

The Wire’s Banjot Kaur spoke to James Smith, a lecturer at the University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health, about the Israel-Hamas conflict’s impact on healthcare workers and more.

New Delhi: James Smith, a lecturer at the University College London’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health, wrote an editorial on the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict along with his colleagues last month in the BMJ Global Health journal.

In that piece, Smith and his colleagues not only went on to describe the details of the attacks and their impact, but also gave important historical and political context.

Many members of the healthcare worker community criticised him for the strong stand taken in that piece.

The Wire spoke to him about the various aspects of the editorial, the suffering of the people as far as health and trauma are concerned, the conflict’s impact on the mental health of healthcare workers, the precedents of such conflicts in which attacks on healthcare facilities were involved, and most importantly, why the healthcare community is shy to take a political stand on crises like these.

Watch the full interview to know more.

Seven Palestinians Killed as Israeli Troops Fire on Gaza Weekly Protest

Israel’s military said its troops resorted to live fire, and an air strike, after explosive devices and rocks were thrown at them and to prevent breaches of the border fence from the Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza enclave.

Gaza: Israeli soldiers shot dead seven Palestinians, including two boys, who were among thousands of people who thronged to the fortified Gaza Strip border on Friday as part of weekly protests launched half a year ago, Gaza health officials said.

Israel’s military said its troops resorted to live fire, and an air strike, after explosive devices and rocks were thrown at them and to prevent breaches of the border fence from the Islamist Hamas-controlled enclave.

Gaza health officials said 505 people had been wounded, 89 of them by gunshots. They identified the dead as males, two of them aged 12 and 14. The boys’ families could not immediately be reached for comment.

At least 191 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza protests began on March 30 to demand the right of return to lands that Palestinian families fled or were driven from on Israel’s founding in 1948, and the easing of an Israeli-Egyptian economic blockade.

Hamas said Friday’s protest also marked the 18th anniversary of the launch of the last Palestinian revolt against Israel.

A Gaza sniper has killed one Israeli soldier and incendiary devices flown over by Palestinians using kites and helium balloons have set off fires that destroyed tracts of forest and farmland in Israel.

Israel accuses Hamas, against which it has fought three wars in the last decade, of having deliberately provoked violence in the protests, a charge Hamas denies.

More than two million people are packed into Gaza, whose economic plight is a focus of so-far fruitless US-led efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, stalled since 2014.

(Reuters)