Responding to the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Damned if You do… Damned if You don’t!

Palestine, since 1948, has endured frequent military occupations and uprisings, intifadas, in a limited geographic area that has resulted in one of the worst humanitarian crises. The prolonged nature of this military occupation has created a biosphere of war that is uninhabitable, whereby Palestinians suffer from physical, psychological, and social wounds. Israel also imposed restrictive measures in Gaza, making it difficult for Palestinians to obtain permits to work and travel throughout Palestine. Israel continued to intensify the restrictions on Gaza, reaching a blockade on the Gaza Strip, which cut off Palestinians from Jerusalem, where hospitals, banks, and vital services are found. This form of permanent siege resulted in a surge in the unemployment rate, poverty, and poor nutritional and wellbeing status. The siege also resulted in the largest open-air prison, as people became stuck between an incomplete life and the absence of total death. The major challenge is that humanitarian interventions, in the case of Gaza, are ineffective, as they are part of the siege framework. This is because any humanitarian aid meant for Gaza needs to be approved by Israel. Thus, when the emergency becomes chronic and humanitarian interventions become part of the siege framework, how can Gaza rebuild its health capacity in a permanent emergency, and to what extent can the humanitarian sector make a change

AMR and Covid-19 on the Frontline: A Call to Rethink War, WASH, and Public Health

This Viewpoint calls for a greater understanding of the role that water plays in the transmission of anti-microbial resistance and covid-19 in protracted urban armed conflict, in order to develop a ‘pathogen-safe’ practice. It argues that dealing with the twin threats is difficult enough in the best of circumstances, and is so little understood in war zones that surgeons and water engineers now question if their practice does more harm than good. Experience suggests that the known transmission routes are complicated by a great number of factors, including the entry of heavy metals through bullets in patients’ wounds, hospital over-crowding, mutation in treated water or wastewater, and other threats which endure long after the bombing has stopped. The skeleton research agenda proposes greater sewage surveillance, testing of phages and monitoring of treatment designed to dispel or substantiate these assertions

How COVID-19 highlighted the need for infection prevention and control measures to become central to the global conversation: experience from the conflict settings of the Middle-East.

The COVID-19 pandemic has managed to bring to the foreground, in just few months, the conversation around what Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) experts have been pushing for decades to control the spread of infections. Implementing the basics of IPC has been a challenge for all affected countries battling with an exponential COVID-19 curve of infection, preventing nosocomial transmission of the disease in highly-resourced and stable contexts but more so in the conflict context of the Middle-East. COVID-19 has created additional challenges to a long list of existing ones hindering the implementation of optimal IPC measures, necessary to break the chain of infection of both respiratory and non-respiratory infections, in those settings. This paper outlines and gives examples of the challenges faced across the Middle East conflict setting and serves as a call for action for IPC to be prioritized, given the needed resources, and fed with contextualized evidence

Demonstration of the Effectiveness of Augmented Reality Telesurgery in Complex Hand Reconstruction in Gaza

Summary:. Augmented reality (AR) is defined as “a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the real world, thus providing a composite view.”1 This case report describes how emerging AR telesurgery technologies may be used to facilitate international surgeon–surgeon collaboration and training. Here, we illustrate how a remote surgeon in Beirut, Lebanon, was able to offer assistance to a surgeon in Gaza, Palestine, during a complex hand reconstruction case following a bomb-blast injury in an 18-year-old male. We discuss the implications of AR technology on the future of global surgery and how it may be used to reduce structural inequities in access to safe surgical care