Juan Cole
Informed Comment / August 3, 2024
Ann Arbor – In a 2011 exposé , Mike Stobbe of NBC news revealed a long history of federal physicians from the US deliberately infecting challenged persons or prisoners with diseases so as to experiment on them.
For instance, Stobbe wrote, “In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.”
The Israeli government is now conducting a massive experiment on over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children, to see whether being compelled to live in completely unsanitary conditions will cause health epidemics among them and much reduce their numbers. The World Health Organization estimates tens of thousands of people to be at risk from this experiment, which recalls those not only of federal scientists in the US but of Josef Mengele.
The UN Relief and Works Agency reports that there have been 40,000 cases of hepatitis A in Gaza since Israel’s total war on its civilians began last October. There were only 85 such cases in the same period the previous year. The disease is a liver inflammation and damage, spread by exposure to raw sewage or contact with an infected person.
The World Health organization says that more people in Gaza could die from infectious diseases than from being bombed by the Israeli Air Force. Officially over 39,000 are dead in military violence, though medical professionals on the ground estimate that the true toll is likely around 100,000 by now. So WHO is saying that 40,000 to 100,000 people could die of disease, a major epidemic in a country of a little over 2 million, or at the higher estimate as much as 4.5 percent of the population. That would be equivalent to 15 million Americans — more than the entire population of Pennsylvania — being forced into such unsanitary living conditions that they died of disease.
WHO also announced that it is sending a million polio vaccines to Gaza in hopes of averting an epidemic outbreak, since the polio virus has been found in wastewater there. Dr Hanan Balkhy, WHO Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, said at an informational meeting, “I witnessed at first hand living conditions that are highly favourable for the spread of polio and other diseases. This is an important time…to come together to act swiftly and decisively to contain this outbreak, for the children of Gaza.” Severe polio can cause paralysis for life or death.
Getting the vaccines into the Strip and having enough medical personnel to administer them is, however, a severe problem. Also, polio vaccines need to be refrigerated at 36°to 46°F (2°to 8°C), which is impossible in Gaza, where there is almost no electricity and where most hospitals have been rendered defunct by the Israeli military’s attacks.
Hepatitis A is a virus that causes acute infection. NIH notes that in some cases “hepatitis A can be severe and lead to liver failure and the need for an emergency liver transplant to survive.” For many, it lasts weeks and then goes away. There are only about 3,000 cases a year in the United States, a country of 340 million people, so 40,000 cases in a population of 2.2 million (or 2.1 million, since the Israelis have almost certainly rubbed out at least 100,000 people) is an enormous outbreak. The disease can cause loss of appetite and nausea, putting children at risk of malnutrition, especially in Gaza where so many children already suffer from it.
We should be clear that Israel is deliberately inflicting such disease outbreaks on the civilians of Gaza. By constantly keeping them on the run, destroying sewage treatment facilities or denying people the fuel and electricity needed to run them, and destroying buildings with toilets in them, the Israeli gov ernment is exposing millions of noncombatants to unsanitary conditions with malice and forethought.
The United Nations says that satellite images show that Israeli Air Force and armor have damaged or destroyed nearly two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza: “”Of these, 30 percent were destroyed, 12 percent severely damaged, 36 percent moderately damaged, and 20 percent possibly damaged, representing approximately 63 percent of the total structures in the region.” The destruction has left behind 42 metric tons of rubble, 82% more than in January. Many residential complexes were targeted with 2000-pound bombs, wiping out entire extended families.
Mohammed Naserallah, a displaced Palestinian in Gaza, said this week, “We have been displaced from the north. They told us: ‘Leave to central Gaza, then to Rafah.’ We went to Rafah, then went back up to Nuseirat. We got stuck. Then we received instructions to move farther south towards Al-Mawasi.”
After Israel issued new displacement orders for central Gaza earlier this week, Al- Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported from the ground, “The majority of the displaced population is flowing to the Deir al-Balah city that is already packed with displaced families and has no sufficient space or resources to accommodate people.” Some 86 percent of Gaza is under Israeli “evacuation” orders, i.e. ethnic cleansing.
In its assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, the Israeli military and intelligence apparatus demonstrated that it is perfectly capable of precisely targeting Hamas personnel without killing thousands of other people. Israeli investigative reporters have revealed that the Israeli army’s rules of engagement allow 15 to 20 civilian deaths for every militant killed, and that a tracking program is used to kill al-Qassam Brigade paramilitary members when they come home to their families in the evening, ensuring that their children, wives, relatives and neighbors are also blown away by drones and rockets.
Bonus Video: “Gaza health officials declare polio ‘epidemic’ as virus spreads | Al Jazeera Newsfeed ”
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment; he is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of, among others, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
