 Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of the People's South Dispatch. Today we are looking at what's going on with health in Palestine as Israeli attacks continue for more than two weeks. We are joined here by Leit, who is one of the health activists in the People's South Movement, war and conflict group and he's a Palestinian living in Palestine if I'm not mistaken and we're going to talk today about the situation report but also about the broader context of health in Palestine. Thank you so much for joining us and maybe yes just to jump right in perhaps we can start with a little bit of a situation update on Gaza because that has been top of the news for the last days and then move on to the rest of the occupied territories. Yeah of course and that is completely the right place to start. The situation in Gaza is unbelievable and it's horrifying and when we think that things can't get worse or things can't continue because of how horrifying they are we are shocked by even more brutality. We are talking now about nearly 7000 Palestinians who have been killed by the bombardment. We're talking about half of the houses in Gaza being damaged or destroyed. We're talking about people being told to flee 1.1 million people being told to flee and then being bombed in the places that they have fled to under the instruction of the Israeli army. We're talking about 40% of the casualties being children when 50% of the population in Gaza are children. This is indiscriminate but I think it's also very important to emphasize that it's not random. It is very purposeful. Israeli politicians have made their intention to wipe out Gaza very clear. The dehumanizing language that we've seen calling shutting down any discussion about the fact that there might be civilians in Gaza talking about human animals. All of these dehumanization tactics are where it relates to a genocide and so what we are seeing today is an attempted genocide on the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. It is truly horrifying to see this and it's truly horrifying for the world to be collectively gaslighting the Palestinian population as it describes this and talking about nuances and talking about the need to understand the various perspectives at play here. We are talking about an Israeli regime that has always been intent on wiping out the Palestinian population. It has acted over the decades to do that and we're still stuck in the need to prove our humanity. To focus more on the health situation which I know listeners will be particularly interested in. We're talking about hospitals in Gaza reporting that they are getting through a month's worth of consumables in a day. We're talking about demand that is 30 times higher but working with what the Ministry of Health in Gaza described as a third of the usual health personnel. We're talking about the supply of consumables being completely cut off because even before the 7th of October Israel severely limited access of goods and people in and out of Gaza through a blockade that had been going on since 2007. For the last two weeks Israel has imposed a total blockade. That means nothing and no one getting in or out. That includes water, that includes fuel, that includes electricity, that includes food, that includes medical supplies and medications. We're talking about doctors treating wound infections with vinegar. That is something that's happening. We're talking about explosives being used and fires being set to houses and doctors not having burns dressings to use. We're talking about people being treated on the floor and their relatives holding up the fluid banks for them. We're talking about 12 hospitals, one-third of the hospitals in Gaza already being out because of either damage or because they've run out of fuel. Even the UN Relief and Works Agency is expecting to run out of fuel today. They are talking about already having made choices about whether they share the little fuel that they have with hospitals, shelters or bakeries. That is the situation on the ground at the moment. Every time I ask any of my colleagues in Gaza or every time I communicate with them, they say things like it is hell. They say things like we are living in hell. They talk about things getting worse and worse. When I see them, they're being interviewed on the TV. You see the exhaustion, you see the disbelief, you see just the sheer being in the middle of this and it not stopping day after day. Absolutely. There's no right or wrong thing to say after what you just shared. It's the situation in Gaza that we've been observing for the past weeks is something truly horrifying. While most governments in the world have sided with Israel very clearly, we have seen also people around standing in solidarity with Palestine. I hope that's an attempt that's going to last and that's actually going to find more practical ways of supporting the struggle of the people in Palestine. But before we move on and maybe talk a bit more about that broader political analysis, I was wondering if we can spend a couple of minutes talking about what's going on in the West Bank, both in health and otherwise, because that's something that we've heard significantly less of. But we do know that it's also very worrying what you're seeing happening there. Yeah, thank you for asking that because not only is it being ignored, I think the other thing to bear in mind, what Israel subjects Palestinians to in the rest of Palestine and outside of Palestine also helps us understand what Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip. It is all part of the same package of settler colonialism of this policy and intention to eliminate the Palestinian population. The killing, the dispossession happens to Palestinians regardless where they are through different means at different paces using different methods. So just to maybe take a few specific bits of information about what's going on in the West Bank. I think that it's important to first of all talk about the total control that Israel exerts in the West Bank. And so on a normal day, Israel is able to erect checkpoints, roadblocks, whatever, anywhere that it really wants a moment's notice. What it has done since the 7th of October is make it incredibly difficult for Palestinians to move beyond that kind of immediate localities. So that means that, you know, the flow of people and goods and of course, even patients has been restricted by the imposition of strict checkpoints, many of which are completely closed, and some of which will subject people to delays and long searches, which means that even if there are, there is a way, for example, to get from the city of Nablus to the city of Ramallah, which is on a normal day, a 54 kilometer journey, there's a long kind of detour to take in order to get to the checkpoint that's open where people would face delays and where people will also be going between Israeli settlement where even if the settlers aren't soldiers on duty, they are heavily armed, they are extremely violent and they are being egged on to be even more violent by the Israeli state. So those Israeli state is delivering 10,000 rifles, 10,000 rifles to Israeli settlers in the West Bank and is doing so so so so harmoniously, you see the videos of them distributing them and they're just, you know, handing over these huge guns to fanatic settlers who live right on our doorsteps and who are kind of participating in that total domination. And so that's kind of one of the most noticeable things that you see is that lack of movement from because of the actions of the Israeli army that's shutting the routes and checkpoints between localities and the Israeli settlers who are subjecting anyone who passes through to violence. That has extended to, for example, if we just take one example, the village of Khusra has two settlements that sit on top of its lands and the settlers from those outposts were, for a week before the 7th of October, shutting off the entrance and exit to Khusra village, they were attacking residents and trying to burn houses and cars and whatever. And then a few days ago, I would say it was exactly after the 7th of October, they descended again on the village of Khusra and opened fire alongside the Israeli army which came and usually kind of says that their presence is there to protect, you know, the Palestinian civilian population in case of any attacks on them actually participated in the shooting. The Israeli settlers ended up killing three people that day and the Israeli army killed one. So four people were killed by Israelis with settlers and soldiers working hand in hand. The next day at the funeral of the people who were killed by the Israeli army, the Israeli army and settlers came back and killed two more Palestinians, a father and his son. That's the type of violence that we're seeing and it's there to kill but it's there also to intimidate and subjugate and keep people within those faculties and squeeze the Palestinian population further, which of course also gives the Israeli army and settlers a green card to just take over more lands and, you know, we're now entering the olive harvest season, people aren't able to access their lands and that makes them vulnerable to take over by the settlers and soldiers which are stated calls of the settler movement and of the Israeli state. So we're talking about this possession taking place in the West Bank as well as we speak, which is a continuation of something that's been going on since 1967. We're seeing also obviously with settlers and soldiers being even more violent than they are normally, a rapidly increasing rate of attacks on healthcare. So ambulances being obstructed. We're seeing, you know, military searches of healthcare assets where, you know, we're seeing people being injured and ambulance is not being able to reach them, which also comes alongside a massively increasing rate of Israeli rates on Palestinian towns to imprison and kill Palestinians. We've seen airstrikes in the West Bank for the first time in a long time. You know, there was a horrific one in Janine refugee camp just a few days ago at a mosque and we're seeing martyrs and people and injured and people being imprisoned in the West Bank every single day. We've seen the number of political prisoners almost double in two weeks. There were 5,200 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails on the 6th of October. We now don't know the number. We don't know the number of people who are imprisoned. It's estimated to be 10,000 and that's because the Israeli military is severely restricting lawyer visits to Palestinian prisoners and has completely withdrawn all family and Red Cross visits to Israeli prisons and has withdrawn every one of the rights that prisoners have have hard won through protests and hunger strikes over the years. So, you know, we're seeing, you know, televisions being confiscated, radios being confiscated, all electrical outlets being shut off, water access to water being restricted, can teams being closed. So only the food that's being supplied by the Israeli prison service, which is completely inadequate in both in quantity and quality being the only food that's available for prisoners. We're talking about all belongings being confiscated. So the only thing that a prisoner has is their clothes that they're currently wearing. And some prisoners don't even have mattresses because Israel has suspended the rule about limiting the number of prisoners in a particular cell. And so the prisons are now being overcrowded, they're opening new prisons and we don't even know which ones they are. So we're talking about a complete crackdown and that has has led and we believe it's led directly these conditions and the lack of oversight of what's going on in the prisons led to the death of two prisoners in Israeli prisons this week. One was being held in administrative detention and one was not even charged with anything yet. He'd been in prison for two days, not even brought charges or to administrative detention. So the expectation is that he was likely tortured to death. Well that's, yeah, again it's very disturbing to hear the extents to which the occupation is kind of cracking down on people who are just trying to live their lives in their own land. So I mean it's again I'm sorry if I'm not making much sense but of course it's very difficult to talk about something that I think we all agree is very and just wrong. And it's kind of hard to contextualize it in this way and make a sense of a conversation that is just showing what you've been living through for the past you know decades and almost a century now if we look at it in the whole in the whole scale. So it's truly amazing and I think that to come back to what we mentioned before you know it has been also truly disturbing and amazing at the same time to see how the West has reacted to that and how corporate media is still reacting to it and essentially just gaslighting everybody about what's going on in Palestine and the extent of the horrific, horrific life conditions that people are forced to live in. At the same time you know in speaking from a Western point of view we've seen a major crackdown on protests in support of Palestine which again is showing something about the government that we have in place here. But on the other hand the banks actually did not make the people back out back away and I think that's a good sign we have seen massive rallies in major cities across the US across Europe. And of course these rallies mostly focus to support what they're hearing from the Palestinian people and want to support the demands of the Palestinian people. So maybe to close off maybe we can just you know walk through in addition to ceasefire of course which we have seen top of the agenda for the last couple of days people calling for immediate ceasefire now. But I think there are also other things that are worth highlighting and pushing for by both movements in Palestine and across the world so maybe just a brief overview of that. Yeah of course so yeah as you say it is of course important to address kind of what is happening now but it's also incredibly important to put this in context because if we only have a ceasefire as an example then we're not saying you know we're not talking about we're not addressing the siege not just the siege that's going on since the since a couple of weeks which is cutting off completely water and electricity and fuel etc etc but the the siege that's been imposed on Gaza by Israel since 2007 we're talking about you know Israel exerting that control what we should be looking at is one how to stop the immediate damage that's happening so of course we absolutely need a ceasefire two weeks ago we needed two weeks ago but that basically as soon as it is possible to impose a ceasefire we need an end to the siege but we also need to completely reverse the control that Israel even has over a Palestinian population so it is that so and that requires you know looking at that broader picture that Israel doesn't have the power to control whether Palestinian enters their land or doesn't enter their land whether they live a healthy and fulfilling life or not and that's where that that demand for Palestinian self-determination comes in and that self-determination absolutely cannot happen with Israel being as powerful as it is over the lives of Palestinians and so of course that would include then so then within that framework then we include the you know the end of the end of the siege and the end of the occupation of the West Bank the end of the occupation of the lands that were stolen in 1948 that dispossession that started as long ago as that which would allow Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands and and country that they were kicked out of 75 years ago you know a population that has its rights only on paper from from UN resolutions and so on but which has not been realized and that no one is working on a concerted effort to ensure that those rights are fulfilled and that requires so all of those things would require a complete shift in the power which means that the resistance to Israel needs to look at how Israel draws its power and we're talking about here cultural political and economic power that Israel is able to leverage internationally and so it's the responsibility of every single person to look at their doorstep and think you know it's the job that I'm in serving these colonial interests is the other products that I buy you know are the institutional links that we have so looking at academic institutions you know we know that there's academic whitewashing of Israeli crimes we know that there's environmental greenwashing we know that there's queer pinquashing and we need to resist those efforts because they are central to how Israel kind of propagates its power by you know putting forward for example like innocuous academic and health partnerships but then actually when you look at a lot of academic and health institutions and even the projects themselves then go on quite often to serve Israeli military purposes we see it really clearly as well in the agricultural industry so when we look at you know Israel you know it's things that's kind of almost miraculous coming out of the bible like we get water from thin air but those things are often actually a product of military research that then is used in agriculture or the other way around it's a revolving door and so when we talk I mean Israel keeps loves talking about dual use equipment that goes onto the Gaza Strip they're the best at the dual use story right the the dual use of basically everything in their society even people right the hundreds of thousands being drafted to invade Gaza in the next few days that entire population is dual use civilians when they feel like they want to be civilians and then you know hard combatants when they want them to be so so that's the fate that you know those are the two faces of Israeli colonialism but they're there to create that image for Israel which is kind of quite innocuous but actually has this other face behind it which which serves that it's colonial interests so it's really important to be to recognize that Israel does um kind of leverage that power from cultural institutions from academic institutions from health institutions all around the world then it's important to boycott all of that until Palestinians are free and that means full self-determination and the final thing I would just say as well is um reparations for all the damage all the destroyed houses all the people who've been killed all the pain all the suffering that's been caused that doesn't go away even if Israel likes to pretend like it's over as soon as it achieves its managed free goals thank you so much Lee and I do believe that we'll see each other again here sometime soon and yes thank you again so much for joining us and for making time to do this thank you Anna thank you