Jew World Order

The Latest:

• 341,856 Palestinians tested positive for COVID-19; 335,105 recoveries; 3,823 deaths
• Of those who tested positive, 199,719 live in the West Bank, 113,296 live in Gaza, and 28,841 live in East Jerusalem 
• 840,522 Israelis tested positive for COVID-19; 833,221 recoveries; 6,429 deaths

Last week we reported a deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel over Pfizer vaccines that fell through after a shipment of doses arrived in the West Bank with a closer than the anticipated expiration date. This week, we have more details about how the agreement broke down and what the Palestinians want from a new deal. 

Palestinian Minister of Health Mai al-Kaila told Wafa News Agency this week, that earlier this year the Palestinian government had signed a purchase agreement with Pfizer for slightly more than 4 million doses at a price of $6.75 per jab. The vaccines were due to arrive in three allocations throughout 2021. The first batch was scheduled to arrive in separate shipments in April, May, and June, resulting in around 20,000 doses per week. However, weeks ago Pfizer notified that their stock had run short and there would be summer delays after falling to keep pace with international demand. 

“The lack of vaccinations during this period (i.e. monthly in June and July 2021) will prevent the resumption of in-person learning and university instruction, so we contacted the parent company, Pfizer, several times and gave them the general direction of our national vaccination plan,” al-Kaila said. 

“We asked them to provide us with one million doses representing the second batch,” she explained. 

In May, Pfizer came up with a possible solution. According to al-Kaila, the pharmaceutical company proposed Israel, with a surplus of 1.4 million doses, would transfer the vaccines to the Palestinians and the company will replace them when more are made. Those vaccines were due to expire in June, July, and August.

“In order to avoid a possible return to lockdown, we decided to proceed with the agreement, and we started working on it with Pfizer, and an agreement in this regard was signed with them at that time,” al-Kaila said. 

Then a three-week delay hit. The minister of health said Israel had two conditions: first, no vaccines would ship to the Gaza Strip. Second, the language of the agreement would refer to the Palestinian government as the “Palestinian Authority,” instead of the “State of Palestine,” the name it conducts business under in international forums. 

Al-Kaila said the ministry “categorically rejected” the terms and that the deal still carried forward. Then war broke out in Gaza and the timeline was again pushed back. By the time the first doses arrived in the West Bank last Friday, the vaccines that arrived were two weeks away from the expiration date. 

“When we approved the agreement last May, the production line number was included in the draft agreement, but after the Israeli side’s procrastination and the delay in delivering the vaccines until yesterday, the expiration date became too close, so we refused to receive the shipment and returned it to the Israeli side,” al-Kaila said. 

Now, al-Kaila hopes her government will revive the same deal with Israel and Pfizer but pull from a stockpile of vaccines with a later expiration date. She said her office is still in direct communication with counterparts in Israel’s ministry of health. 

“We will resume discussions with Pfizer as soon as possible to obtain vaccines that will expire at the end of July so that we have sufficient time to vaccinate all demographics in our national vaccination campaign,” she said. 

Thus far, 474,341 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been vaccinated with at least one dose. At least 326,220 have received two jabs. 

According to the WHO dashboard, 92% of Palestinians who tested positive in new COVID-19 cases in the last week live in Gaza. 

Physicians and city workers assaulted in Gaza

This week Al-Mezan, a human rights group in Gaza, released a shocking press release on healthcare and municipal workers being assaulted while at work, reflecting a “breakdown in the rule of law and of desperation among the population,” following the 11-day escalation with Israel last month. The group found instances where physicians and city workers were attacked in “workplace violence” that “severely hampers the provision of vital services.” 

In one instance, an  emergency room physician Dr. Abeer Yousef Tabash told Al Mezan last Friday:

“A patient in her early thirties arrived at the emergency room accompanied by four people pushing her hospital bed. The patient was placed in the ward designated for patients and divided by hospital curtains. I told the patient’s relatives to wait outside and allowed one companion to enter the ward as I was about to examine her. I was extremely surprised, however, when one of the relatives aggressively grabbed my arm and pushed me back while shouting at me and asking my name. He shouted angrily, ‘you killed my brother.’ I was utterly shocked and told him to stay away from me, but his relative also tried to assault me while verbally abusing me. A woman accompanying the patient and these men grabbed my arms and started shaking me. A police officer arrived at the scene. I remember seeing him jostle the patient’s relatives as I rushed to the on-call room. I filed a complaint about the attack to the police. I was later informed that one of the patient’s family members had died earlier on Wednesday. I was on the night shift then, but I was not the supervising doctor who worked on the case of the deceased.”

That same day, the Gaza City Municipality told Al Mezan “that the director of the Municipality’s Coordination and Supervision Department, engineer Khalil Mohammed Al-Shaqra, 59, was assaulted on Friday morning, June 18 2021, while trying to prevent a group of men from stealing tiles and stones from the intersection of Al-Wehda and Abdel Qader streets.”

“The theft would have caused further damage to the streets, which were substantially damaged in the latest Israeli offensive against Gaza,” the group said.      

At least 8,500 Palestinians still displaced after hostilities end in Gaza 

According to a briefing at the Security Council on Thursday by Tor Wennesland, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, at least 8,500 Palestinians still have no place to live after their homes were destroyed in hostilities in May. During the escalation, over 113,000 took shelter at UN schools or stayed with relatives. But as of June 10, Wennesland revealed two shelters inside schools are still operational and a number of Palestinians are staying with host families. 

The briefing also mentioned a subset of homeless Palestinians whose houses and apartments were bombed in the 2014 war and are still displaced. That number is 3,600, or 600 families. We’ll keep following this story over the next few months. 

That’s it for this week. Stay safe.

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