The global rights group says erosion of health, safety in Gaza ‘a deliberate act of war targeting women and girls’.

Palestinian women in the Gaza Strip have been “denied the conditions needed to live and to give life safely” by Israel amid its genocidal war on the enclave, according to Amnesty International, a global rights group.

Amnesty warned on Tuesday that women and girls in Gaza have been pushed “to the brink” as the Israeli war has spurred a series of hardships, from mass displacement to the destruction of the local healthcare system.

Pregnant women, as well as those who need treatment for cancer and other illnesses, have been particularly hard-hit by the lack of adequate health services in the territory, Amnesty said in a statement.

“This systematic erosion of their rights to health, safety, dignity and a future is not an unfortunate by-product of war; it is a deliberate act of war targeting women and girls,” the group said.

“It is also the foreseeable consequence of Israel’s calculated policies and practices of multiple mass displacement, deliberate restrictions on basic and essential items, as well as humanitarian relief, and two years of relentless bombardment that have devastated Gaza’s health system and decimated entire families.”

More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s war on Gaza began in October 2023.

Israeli attacks have continued despite a US-brokered “ceasefire” that came into effect in October of last year, killing more than 600 people, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Israel also continues to impede the steady flow of humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced across the Strip due to the Israeli bombardment.

Last week, the United Nations humanitarian office (OCHA) said the health sector in Gaza remains “under significant constraints” as a result of the restrictions on medical supplies and equipment, as well as fuel.

“Sexual and reproductive health services remain severely disrupted due to damaged infrastructure, shortages of essential medicines and supplies and limited referral capacity,” OCHA said, noting that as many as 180 women give birth daily in Gaza.

“Severe bed shortages mean women undergoing major procedures, including Caesarean sections, are often discharged within hours and return to overcrowded displacement settings, increasing risks of complications and infection,” the agency said.

Maternal, neonatal health problems

That was echoed by Amnesty, which said on Tuesday that medical workers in Gaza reported “an exponential increase in maternal and neonatal health conditions over the past 29 months” as a result of Israel’s genocide.

That includes pre-term births, low-weight babies and babies suffering from respiratory conditions, malnutrition of pregnant women, and postpartum depression, the rights group said.

“Displacement conditions have led to infectious diseases,” Dr Nasser Bulbol, a neonatologist at Al Helou Hospital hospital in Gaza City, told Amnesty, noting that there has been an increase in high-risk pregnancies due to conditions in the Strip.

“And most women come here under stress, trauma and uncertainty, having suffered multiple displacements, lost loved ones, unable to obtain the nutritious food they require.”

A 22-year-old Palestinian woman originally from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza said she weighed only 43 kilogrammes (94 pounds) when she gave birth to a son in mid-January.

“My baby was born with lung infection in both lungs; he spent several days in the intensive care unit and now is a bit better, but still cannot breathe properly on his own and is in an incubator,” said the woman, who is displaced and living in southern Gaza’s al-Mawasi area.

“I am afraid he will get sicker because I live in a tent by the sea, and it has been very cold, and there is no way to keep warm. I also have another baby aged 18 months, and he too has been sick from the cold,” she told the rights group.

World Opinion + Agencies

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Qu’a-t-il connu de la vie en ces cinq petites années? Peut-être la lumière du soleil qui se lève et qui se couche, peut-être la bonté d’une source d’eau pure, sûrement l’amour et la tendresse de ses parents. Et puis, voilà, comme s’il avait été en visite en notre monde, il s’en est allé. Une visite bien courte et qui se termine douloureusement.

Le décès du petit Rayan, après plusieurs jours de tentatives de l’extraire de ce trou de malheur, a passionné non seulement tout le Maroc mais aussi l’Europe. Les médias en ont parlé à chaque bulletin d’information. Les gens en parlent encore entre eux dans les cafés et les marchés. Je les ai entendus. Chacun proposait sa solution technique pour atteindre l’enfant coincé au fond du puits. C’est devenu une affaire touchant tout le monde. L’annonce de sa mort a été un choc reçu intimement par des millions de gens.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que le sauvetage d’un enfant, notamment après un tremblement de terre ou un glissement de terrain, passionne des millions de personnes.

Pourquoi et comment?

Quand on est père, on est père de tous les enfants du monde.

C’est un sentiment universel, semblable à l’instinct des animaux qui protègent leurs bébés et sont prêts à se battre pour que personne ne s’en approche.

Quand on est père, on est habité tout le temps par une inquiétude plus ou moins grande, parfois visible, d’autres fois enfouie dans les tripes.

L’enfant n’est pas sacré, mais c’est une part de nous-mêmes.

Tout ou presque se décide à l’enfance. Le reste, arrive, se construit, se dessine, selon la vie de chacun. Mais la base est là, elle doit être solide. L’attachement à l’enfance qu’elle fut bonne ou malheureuse, est une source inépuisable pour les écrivains, les cinéastes, les créateurs en général. On sait que tout part de là, et ce n’est pas Freud qui nous contredirait.

Le pauvre Rayan s’en est allé, après des jours et des nuits de peur, d’angoisse, de douleur, de faim, de soif et puis de désespoir. Une torture que le destin lui a administré. Il est tombé dans un puits comme s’il avait chuté d’un immeuble de cinq étages. Il a dû arriver au fond tout cassé.

Qu’a-t-il connu de la vie en ces cinq petites années? Peut-être la lumière du soleil qui se lève et qui se couche, peut-être la bonté d’une source d’eau pure, sûrement l’amour et la tendresse de ses parents. Et puis, voilà, comme s’il avait été en visite en notre monde, il s’en est allé. Il a trébuché sur une pierre et puis il est tombé dans les ténèbres. Une visite bien courte et qui se termine douloureusement.

Trop jeune pour réciter de mémoire quelques versets du Coran qui l’auraient apaisé. Trop angoissé pour appeler ses parents et même s’il l’avait fait, personne ne l’aurait entendu. L’horreur est dans les cris renvoyés à soi, les appels qui ne montent pas du font de ce puits.

J’imagine l’état dans lequel se trouvent en ces jours les parents de Rayan. Pas besoin de beaucoup d’imagination. C’est un sentiment d’horreur et de dévastation doublé de culpabilité, même s’ils ne pensaient pas que l’enfant allait passer par un endroit dangereux.

Il y a aussi la solidarité de tous les Marocains. Elle est émouvante. Il y a les artificiers sur le terrain, il y a les autorités qui ont fait ce qu’elles pouvaient, qui n’ont lésiné sur aucun moyen. A situation exceptionnelle, comportement exceptionnel.

Quelle leçon tirer de cette tragédie?

Certes, boucher les trous des puits, ou faire en sorte que le diamètre soit assez grand pour laisser passer une échelle et une personne, en cas de sauvetage.

Mais on a beau être vigilant, un accident arrive et on se retrouve désemparé, face à l’incompréhensible, à ce qui nous rend si faibles et impuissants devant la réalité brutale.

Il est urgent non seulement de fermer les puits, là où on sonde pour avoir de l’eau, mais aussi d’autres lieux où des travaux sont en cours et où les risques d’accident sont multiples. Reste le rôle des parents. Je ne vais pas les accabler. Mais, une attention accrue est nécessaire pour que le risque et la prudence fassent partie de l’éducation. 

Par Tahar Ben Jelloun

L’article Maroc. Brutal, le destin est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Fossil fuel companies lied for decades about climate change, and humanity is paying the price. Shouldn’t those lies be central to the public narrative?

Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.

This crime has been going on for decades. We see its effects in the horrific heat and wildfires unfolding this summer in the American West; in the megastorms that were so numerous in 2020 that scientists ran out of names for them; in the global projections that sea levels are set to rise by at least 20 feet (6 metres). Our only hope is to slow this inexorable ascent so our children may figure out some way to cope.

This crime has displaced or killed untold numbers of people around the world, caused billions of dollars in economic damage and ravaged vital ecosystems and wildlife. It has disproportionately affected already marginalised communities around the world, from farmers in coastal Bangladesh, where the fast-rising seas are salting the soil and slashing rice yields, to low-income residents of Houston, Chicago and other cities, whose neighbourhoods suffer higher temperatures than prosperous areas across town.

This crime threatens today’s young people most of all and calls into question the very survival of the human civilisation. And yet, the criminals responsible for this devastation are still at large. Indeed, they continue to perpetrate their crime, and even make money from it, not least because their crime remains unknown to most of the public.

This is enough to make your blood boil, especially if you are a parent. My daughter just turned 16, and I have been thinking about the safest place she can spend her adult life since she was a baby and I first started writing about adapting to climate change. The orange skies blanketing her hometown of San Francisco after last summer’s record wildfires were a heartbreaking, infuriating sign that California will not be that safe haven.

The crime in question is the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years of lying about climate change. Arguably the most consequential corporate deception in history, the industry’s lies have had the effect of blunting public awareness and governmental action against what scientists say is now a full-fledged climate emergency. As a candidate in the 2020 US presidential elections, Joe Biden said he would support efforts to prosecute the oil giants for their lies. It remains to be seen whether he will keep that promise.

Journalists have dedicated years to documenting the crime scene evidence. In 2015, an investigation by the Columbia Journalism School and the Los Angeles Times blew the case open by tracing the crime link to ExxonMobil, then the world’s largest oil company.

Internal records showed that by the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists were briefing its top executives that man-made global warming was real, potentially catastrophic, and caused mainly by burning fossil fuels. Climate activists seized on the revelations, launching the hashtag #ExxonKnew.

Further investigations found that Chevron, Shell, and other oil giants likewise knew that their products threatened to render the earth’s climate uninhabitable. In short, it was not just Exxon that knew. They all knew.

And they all chose to lie about it.

Beginning in the 1990s, oil companies spent millions upon millions of dollars on public relations campaigns to confuse the press, the public, and policymakers about the dangers posed by burning fossil fuels. Their aim was “to reposition global warming as theory, not fact”, one planning document stated. Front groups and friendly politicians spread the companies’ lies. News outlets, especially in the United States, swallowed and regurgitated those lies to an unsuspecting public.

Humanity ultimately wasted precious decades arguing about whether global warming was real rather than defusing the threat. Instead of launching a transition to renewable energy, the consumption of fossil fuels increased. More than half of the total greenhouse gases now overheating the planet were emitted after 1990 – after Exxon and other fossil fuel giants privately knew what havoc they were seeding.

Exxon “could have ended the pretend debate over climate change as early as the 1980s”, author and activist Bill McKibben later wrote. “When scientists like NASA’s Jim Hansen first raised public awareness of climate change [in 1988], think of what would have happened if Exxon’s chief executive had gone to Congress, too, and said that their internal scientific efforts show[ed] precisely the same thing.”

While pockets of the American public may already know about big oil’s crime, the vast majority of its victims almost certainly do not. How could they? Big Oil’s record of lying never became part of the public narrative about climate change, largely because most news outlets did not incorporate it into their continuing coverage of climate change.

The initial “Exxon knew” revelations in 2015 received relatively little follow-up coverage beyond the outlets that published them. Television, which even in the internet era remains the primary source of news for most people, ignored the revelations entirely. There were a few stories in the business press and independent media, especially years later when New York state and other local governments began suing oil companies for damages. But the media as a whole seems to have forgotten that Big Oil’s climate lies ever happened.

It is long past time to right these wrongs. To date, the oil companies, the executives in charge of them, the propagandists they have employed and the politicians they have funded have largely escaped blame, much less had to pay – whether through financial penalties or prison time – for the immense damage they have done. News outlets also owe the public an apology for mishandling this story, along with a commitment to doing much sharper coverage in the future.

Humanity cannot get back the 40 years lost to Big Oil’s climate lies. It is now beyond urgent that rich and poor countries alike quit fossil fuels in favour of renewable energy and other climate-smart practices. Equally crucial is that we fortify our communities against the fearsome climate impacts that, because of our decades of delay, can no longer be avoided.

All this will cost money – lots of it. The world’s governments will be arguing from now through the make-or-break UN climate summit in November about who pays how much. Restoring Big Oil’s lies to their rightful place at the heart of the climate story would offer an answer to that riddle, one that Biden should be pressed on: Big Oil knew – shouldn’t Big Oil pay?

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

By Mark Hertsgaard Co-founder of Covering Climate Now and environment correspondent of The Nation – Aljazzera

L’article The climate crisis is a crime story est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.