Covid-19 rages in West Bank as Israel re-opens
Israel’s spring of hope is unfolding alongside the Palestinians’ winter of despair.
More than half of Israel’s population of 9.3 million have been vaccinated and the lines for vaccines have dwindled. There’s enough of a surplus that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to send thousands of doses to friendly countries. Hotels and restaurants are set to re-open next week.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Covid-19 wards are overstretched, testing centres are as busy as ever and new lockdown measures have been announced. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has acquired only a few thousand doses — not even enough for front-line health workers — and reported nearly 2000 new cases on Wednesday alone.
It’s a stark illustration of the disparity at the heart of the Middle East conflict.
Israel cites past agreements that say the PA is responsible for healthcare in areas it administers. Human rights groups say Israel is shirking its obligations as an occupying power. The PA, perhaps out of concern for its own image, insists it has secured its own supplies.
In the meantime, West Bank hospitals are filling up. A woman who identified herself as Umm Bashar brought her mother to the main hospital in Ramallah two days ago after her oxygen levels dropped. She’s still waiting in the emergency unit for a bed.
The Palestinian Authority has reported more than 130,000 cases in the West Bank since the outbreak began, including at least 1819 cases
on Wednesday. At least 1510 have died, and dozens are in intensive care. In Gaza, which is ruled by the militant Hamas group and under an Israeli-Egyptian blockade, authorities have reported more than 55,000 cases and at least 553 deaths.
While vaccinating its own Arab population, Israel has provided only 2000 Moderna doses to the Palestinian Authority, and it recently approved plans to vaccinate the more than 100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank who work in Israel and Jewish settlements.
Israeli public health officials have urged the Government to go even further and vaccinate the entire West Bank population, given the large degree of interaction between the sides.
“There is no public health justification or moral argument for not providing vaccines to Palestinians,” two leading public health experts wrote in an op-ed in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper.
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem in the 1967 war, territories the Palestinians want for their future state. Under interim peace agreements, the PA is responsible for healthcare in Gaza and the areas it administers in the West Bank, but both sides are supposed to co-operate to combat epidemics.
The PA says it has secured tens of thousands of vaccine doses through a World Health Organisation programme for poor countries and private agreements with drug makers, but has only managed to import 10,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine. Along with the Israeli vaccines, that’s enough to inoculate 6000 people out of a population of nearly 5 million.