RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) – Israel’s spring of hope is unfolding alongside the Palestinian winter of despair.
More than half of Israel’s population of 9.3 million has been vaccinated and queues for vaccination have narrowed. The surplus is enough for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to want to send thousands of doses to friendly countries. Hotels and restaurants are expected to reopen next week.
In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the COVID-19 neighborhoods are overloaded, the test centers are as busy as ever, and new blocking measures have been announced. The Palestinian Authority purchased only a few thousand doses – not even enough for frontline health workers – and reported almost 2,000 new cases on Tuesday alone.
It is a clear illustration of the disparity at the heart of the Middle East conflict – one of the few aspects of life here that has not changed in the past year.
Israel cites previous agreements that state that PA is responsible for health care in the areas it administers. Human rights groups say Israel is shirking its obligations as an occupying power. The AP, perhaps out of concern for its own image, insists that it has secured its own supplies.
In the meantime, West Bank hospitals are filling up. A woman who identified herself as Umm Bashar took her mother to the main hospital in Ramallah two days ago, after her oxygen levels dropped. She is still waiting in the emergency unit for a bed in a newly expanded COVID-19 ward.
“They told us that because of the coronavirus, all beds are occupied,” she said. “Everything became very difficult”.
An emergency room doctor, who was not allowed to speak to reporters and spoke on condition of anonymity, said 14 suspected COVID-19 patients arrived on Tuesday morning, the day after 24 had been transferred to an infirmary. to treat the disease.
At a testing center across the city, many people gathered in an auditorium waiting to be cleaned. Many had symptoms, and several said members of their families tested positive.
“The outbreak is very bad and the cases themselves are very bad, worse than at first,” said Tayeb Zeineddin, who has worked at the test center since the pandemic began. He said that more than 1,000 people attend the tests daily.
The Palestinian Authority has reported more than 130,000 cases in the West Bank since the outbreak began, including at least 1,819 cases on Tuesday. At least 1,510 have died and dozens are in intensive care. In Gaza, which is governed by the militant group Hamas and under an Egyptian-Israeli blockade, authorities have reported more than 55,000 cases and at least 553 deaths.
The effects go far beyond the disease itself.
The World Bank estimates that the Palestinian economy shrank 11.5% in 2020, with the tourism and restaurant sectors hit particularly hard. Unemployment in the West Bank has risen to 15% this year, and an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians live in poverty, he said last month.
Israel launched one of the most successful vaccination campaigns in the world in December, after Netanyahu secured millions of doses from the drug giants Pfizer and Moderna. Demand has stabilized after almost 5 million people have received at least one dose, so Israel is now using a mix of incentives and threats to try to give resistant injections free injections.
In recent days, Netanyahu has been criticized for allegedly planning to share tens of thousands of surplus vaccines with allies in Africa, Europe and Latin America, while providing little to the Palestinians. Israeli media said Netanyahu sought to reward countries that support Israel’s claim to challenge Jerusalem and those that have ties to Israel. Israel’s attorney general froze the program, ruling that Netanyahu acted improperly on his own.
By vaccinating its own Arab population, Israel supplied only 2,000 doses of Moderna to the Palestinian Authority and recently approved plans to vaccinate the more than 100,000 West Bank Palestinians working in Israel and in Jewish settlements.
Israeli public health officials have asked the government to go even further and vaccinate the entire West Bank population, given the high degree of interaction between the sides.
“There is no public health justification or moral argument for not providing vaccines to the Palestinians,” wrote two leading public health experts in an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “A joint public health response between Israel, Gaza and the West Bank remains critical.”
Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, territories that Palestinians want for their future state. Under interim peace agreements, the PA is responsible for health care in Gaza and the areas it administers in the West Bank, but both sides must cooperate to fight epidemics.
“We are living under occupation, so they carry a large part of the responsibility,” said Ibrahim Abu Safiya, who brought his mother to the emergency room on Tuesday and was also waiting for a COVID-19 bed to open.
PA claims to have secured tens of thousands of doses of vaccines through a World Health Organization program for poor countries and private agreements with drug manufacturers, but has only managed to import 10,000 doses of the Russian vaccine Sputnik V. Along with Israeli vaccines , this is enough to inoculate 6,000 people in a population of almost 5 million.
There are some indications that – in the absence of vaccines – the Palestinians are developing some degree of protection on their own.
A recent WHO-supported study showed that about 40% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have contracted COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, indicating a large number of asymptomatic cases.
The study, carried out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health and other official bodies, is based on samples taken from 6,000 people and tested for markers that should be present in the blood of people who have had COVID-19.
“Probably 40% of the population has already been infected and has also acquired antibodies and therefore has some level of protection at the moment,” said Dr. Gerald Rockenschaub, who was WHO’s head for Palestinian Territories at the time of the study.
Further studies are needed to explain why the death rate would be so low, but Rockenschaub was probably linked to the large percentage of young people, who tend to have milder symptoms, in the general population.
“A very significant proportion of those who showed the antibodies did not even know they had the infection,” he said.
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The Associated Press reporter, Nasser Nasser, contributed.