President-elect Donald Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a choice that would add to Trump’s list of provocative picks whose confirmation processes will test the loyalty of Senate Republicans.
Trump on Thursday announced the selection, confirming CNN’s earlier reporting, saying he was thrilled to share the pick.
In the past year, Lebanese medical and health institutions have been attacked 53 times, with 99 patients and staff members killed, according to the WHO.
And due to the deterioration of water and sanitation conditions, a case of cholera was reported in northern Lebanon.
The WHO urged relevant parties to take immediate action to protect Lebanon‘s medical system.
GENEVA, 18 October 2024 -“Gaza is the real-world embodiment of hell on earth for its one million children. And it’s getting worse, day-by-day, as we see the horrific impact of the daily airstrikes and military operations on Palestinian children.
“Let me try and share what that looks like, via one child: A seven-year-old little girl, Qamar. During an attack on Jabalia camp, Qamar was struck in the foot. The only hospital she could be taken to – a maternity hospital – was then under siege for 20 days, by which time the shrapnel in Qamar’s foot had led to infection. Because she couldn’t be moved, and because the hospital didn’t have the resources to cope with all the trauma cases, doctors had to amputate Qamar’s leg……
Medical staff in the north say they are getting calls from all over northern Gaza asking for help, but ambulances are unable to reach the injured.
„The situation is beyond horrific and is very difficult and indescribable,“ Dr. Taghreed Al-Imawi, a member of the Palestinian NGO Juzoor for Health and Social Development and an OB-GYN doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said in a statement. „We have seen more than 23 pregnant women among the injured coming to the hospital since last week, wounded either by shrapnel or gunfire, suffering from fractures.“
Kamal Adwan was one of three hospitals that doctors say were ordered to evacuate last week, but medical staff have refused to do so.
Six medical humanitarian groups, whose emergency medical missions in Gaza have collectively treated over 15,000 patients since October 2023 have been informed this week that their medical missions will hereafter be denied entry into Gaza.
The notice was delivered to these organisations via text message from the World Health Organisation (WHO) following an order issued by the Israeli military via Israel’s ‘Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories’ (COGAT). The reasons behind Israel’s order remain unclear; no information has been provided on the reason or process behind the order to halt life-saving medical missions to Gaza.
This is a death sentence for thousands of patients in Gaza.
A Steering Committee for the Lebanon Response Plan (LRP) was formed today following the endorsement of the humanitarian and stabilization response plan for Lebanon for 2024. The meeting was co-chaired by the Prime Minister and the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator of the UN. It was attended by the Deputy Prime Minister and Ministers of Education and Higher Education, Public Health, Social Affairs, Energy and Water, Labor, Agriculture and Environment; alongside the Ambassadors to Lebanon of Canada, France, the EU, Germany and the charge d‘affaires for the US; as well as Representatives of UN Agencies and national and international NGOs.
Below are the opening remarks as delivered by the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in the LRP Steering Committee meeting:
Your Excellency, Prime Minister Mikati, esteemed ministers, honorable ambassadors, distinguished guests, dear colleagues, good morning.
We gather here today at a truly unprecedented time for Lebanon. This country has already faced many years of multi-layered crises. Over the past year, the escalation of hostilities has inflicted severe damage on communities in the South. In the last weeks, the violence has intensified, causing widespread civilian casualties, mass displacement, and extensive destruction across the country.
Healthcare and frontline workers have come under attack, as have civil defense centers and water supply systems, pushing essential services to the brink of collapse. This must stop.
The U.S. government’s handling of USAID’s memo led to internal conflict, with one official in the State Department, Stacy Gilbert, resigning in May over Blinken’s statement to Congress.
“There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” Gilbert wrote in a statement at the time. “To deny this is absurd and shameful. That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.” (mehr …)
Blinken’s decision allowed the U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel. Under U.S. law, the government is required to cut off weapons shipments to countries preventing the delivery of U.S.-backed aid.
Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.
“What I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country. I’ve spoken with everyone from the Saudis to the Jordanians to the Egyptians. They’re prepared to move in. They’re prepared to move this food in. And I think there’s no excuse to not provide for the medical and the food needs of those people. It should be done now,” Biden said in the interview.
The comments came in the lead up to ..
Royal watchers have begun to witness his decline, too. Though he will be stepping out on Easter Sunday for a service at Windsor, the king is missing from the royal calendar for the foreseeable future, instead relying heavily on his sister, Princess Anne, to do the work of the royal family. While many would have assumed his heir, Prince William, would be stepping up to the plate, he too is missing from the royal schedule due to Princess Kate Middleton’s own cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The administration of the Kamal Adwan hospital announced earlier that they were halting operations as the facility had run out of fuel.
We have seen France and Jordan dropping in several tons of medical aid for the hospitals unable to cope with the endless conveyor belt of maimed and dying civilians.
If the world’s cries for a level of humanitarian aid to reach the people via land borders are still ignored, then the world has a responsibility to get even more support to the people by any means necessary. If they will not let us help by land or sea, then we must try by air.
Friday’s ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) drives something bigger and more powerful than a D9 bulldozer through the western position supporting Israel’s blitzkrieg on Gaza, which has continued for nearly four months.
The ruling establishes that what is going on in Gaza is not a war aimed at disabling an enemy militant group, but an operation aimed at disabling a people, and a nation. There can be no more momentous legal judgement in the history of the conflict, certainly in the current century.
This judgement reestablishes the morality, impartiality and standing of international law, and will show the impunity that Israel has been granted by its major arms suppliers and backers for what it is: a license to kill.
(19.01.2024)
“Mothers face unimaginable challenges in accessing adequate medical care, nutrition and protection before, during and after giving birth,” said UNICEF Communications Specialist Tess Ingram.
“Becoming a mother should be a time for celebration. In Gaza, it‘s another child delivered into hell.”
Echoing deep concerns about the deteriorating humanitarian situation, UN World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed alarm that hepatitis A infections had been confirmed in Gaza.
It’s difficult for Palestinians to see a life here again, which is very sad.”
The intensive-care unit at Gaza City’s Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital was on the brink of collapse on Nov. 10, as the staff tried to keep oxygen flowing to three fragile babies, according to staff who were there that day. Then Israel’s military called on everyone in the medical center to leave….
The Post’s analysis shows:
– The rooms connected to the tunnel network discovered by IDF troops showed no immediate evidence of military use by Hamas.
– None of the five hospital buildings identified by Hagari appeared to be connected to the tunnel network.
– There is no evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards.
Hours before IDF troops entered the complex, the Biden administration declassified U.S. intelligence assessments that it said bolstered Israel’s claims. In the aftermath of the raid, Israeli and U.S. officials have stood firm behind their initial statements.
The Israeli raid on al-Shifa Hospital last month, which was preceded by an evacuation order aimed at thousands of people sheltering at the hospital and hundreds of sick patients, produced one of the grisliest scenes in the country’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip: a “death zone” that included a mass grave at the entrance of the hospital and dozens of desperate patients inside, according to the World Health Organization, whose aid workers arrived at the facility on Nov. 18 as part of a humanitarian mission.
Forty patients, including four premature babies, died in the hospital due to a lack of electricity in the days surrounding the raid, hospital administrators told the United Nations.
(17.12.2023)
Once the most important and largest referral hospital in Gaza, Al-Shifa now houses only a handful of doctors and a few nurses, together with 70 volunteers, working under what WHO staff described as “unbelievably challenging circumstances,” and calling it a “hospital in need of resuscitation.” The operating theatres and other major services remain nonfunctional due to lack of fuel, oxygen, specialized medical staff, and supplies. The hospital is only able to provide basic trauma stabilization, has no blood for transfusion, and hardly any staff to care for the constant flow of patients. Dialysis is being provided to approximately 30 patients a day, with the dialysis machines operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, using a small generator.
The team described the emergency department as a “bloodbath”, with hundreds of injured patients inside, and new patients arriving every minute. Patients with trauma injuries were being sutured on the floor, and limited to no pain management is available at the hospital. WHO staff said that the emergency department is so full that care must be exercised to not step on patients on the floor.
(16.12.2023)
UN workers delivering medical supplies to the Al-Shifa Hospital in north Gaza on 16 December have described the emergency department as a “bloodbath”, with hundreds of injured people inside, and a constant flow of new patients.
(12.12.2023)
Dear President Biden,
The war in the Gaza Strip has been underway for more than nine weeks, ever since Hamas carried out its horrific and criminal attack on Israeli civilians, which included killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping some 250 to Gaza – among them Israeli civilians, foreign nationals and children. Immediately after the attack, and in a speech you later gave in Israel, you made it clear that Israel has the right to defend itself, while emphasizing it must do so only in accordance with the provisions of international law, and particularly the rules of war.
We, Israeli human rights organizations and civil society groups, must at this stage state with a heavy heart that our government has chosen to ignore your advice and similar statements by US officials. This letter does not address the grave suspicions of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law during the war, but centers on the extreme humanitarian crisis developing in Gaza and the urgent need to change Israel’s policy on this issue.
(13.12.2023)
Among the signatories: Academia for Equality, Akevot – Institute for Israeli Palestinian Conflict Research, B’Tselem, Bimkom, Breaking the Silence, Combatants for Peace, Gisha, HaMoked – Center for the Defense of the Individual, Jordan Valley Activists, Looking the Occupation in the Eye, Machsom Watch, Parents Against Child Detentions, Psychoative, Rabbis for Human Rights, Social Workers for Peace and Welfare, Yesh Din and Zazim -Community Action.
This morning, Israeli forces stopped ambulances taking discharged patients home outside Khalil Suleiman hospital. Paramedics and ambulance drivers were ordered out of the ambulances, stripped and made to kneel in the street. The patients were left in the ambulances…
All of this happened in full view of our team. Since 7 October, we have seen Israeli forces fire live bullets at the hospital, tear gas the hospital, block ambulances, humiliate and harass medical staff, and now – shoot and kill someone in the hospital compound…
Hospitals are supposed to be safe spaces. Hospitals must be respected. These attacks must stop. #MustStopNow
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said in a post on X that Israeli forces shot and killed the unarmed boy, Musa Ahmed Musa Khatib, inside Khalil Suleiman hospital compound in Jenin on Thursday.
„Israeli forces stopped ambulances taking discharged patients home outside Khalil Suleiman hospital. Paramedics and ambulance drivers were ordered out of the ambulances, stripped and made to kneel in the street. The patients were left in the ambulances,“ said MSF.
„All of this happened in full view of our team. Since 7 October, we have seen Israeli forces fire live bullets at the hospital, tear gas the hospital, block ambulances, humiliate and harass medical staff, and now – shoot and kill someone in the hospital compound.
Israeli troops backed by tanks and heavy artillery have stormed the besieged Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, where 3,000 displaced people are sheltering from Israeli’s unrelenting assault. Al Jazeera reports medical staff inside the hospital were among those shot and killed, as were two mothers killed Monday when Israel’s military bombarded the hospital’s maternity ward. The hospital’s remaining patients include a dozen children in an intensive care unit and six newborns in incubators.
On 9 December 2023, a WHO team, in collaboration with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and with support from the United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS), completed a high-risk mission to Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City to deliver medical supplies, assess the situation in the hospital, and transfer critically-injured patients to a hospital in the south. The mission delivered trauma and surgical supplies, enough to treat 1500 patients, to the hospital, and transferred 19 critical patients with 14 companions to Nasser Medical Complex in south Gaza, where they can receive a higher level of care.
On the way north, the UN convoy was inspected at the Wadi Gaza checkpoint, and ambulance crew members had to leave the vehicles for identification. Two PRCS staff were detained for over an hour, further delaying the mission. WHO staff saw one of them being made to kneel at gunpoint and then taken out of sight, where he was reportedly harassed, beaten, stripped and searched.
The last barely functioning hospital in northern Gaza is a “humanitarian disaster zone”, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday, highlighting the disastrous consequences of ongoing Israeli bombardment for critically ill and injured civilians across the enclave.
All of this under unprecedented and relentless Israeli bombings. The situation is deteriorating and aid organizations are almost incapable of helping. This isn’t the war’s biproduct, it’s the deliberate outcome of Israel’s policy – a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. >
Our analysis of the policy over the past two months:
https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20231207_humanitarian_catastrophe_as_policy