Gaza's Healthcare System in Collapse: An Exploratory Analysis of Healthcare Attacks in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) and Israel since October 2023
Presenter Biography
Vincenzo is a second-year part-time student in the MPH in Epidemiology program at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. He is passionate about social epidemiology research and the fields of disaster and applied epidemiology.
This project is a product resulting from the BSTA 526 course, where students searched for a dataset of their choice and conducted an analysis in R to answer a research question of interest.
Institution
OHSU
Program/Major
Epidemiology
Degree
MPH
Presentation Type
Poster
Start Date
4-4-2024 1:00 PM
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Keywords
Healthcare Attacks, Health Infrastructure, Health Systems, Humanitarian Crisis, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Human Rights
Abstract
Decades of apartheid practices and oppression in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), marked by mass displacement, restricted access to essential services, and countless human rights violations, have culminated in today's systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. To investigate the systematic obstruction of healthcare access in OPT, this exploratory analysis employs an open intelligence dataset containing event data on reported healthcare attack incidents in OPT and Israel since October 2023. Specifically, this analysis seeks to elucidate the nature and extent of healthcare attacks in OPT by answering student-defined research questions, based on a priori expectations around the data. The analysis confirms that the vast majority of the healthcare attacks occurred within OPT and were a direct repercussion of Israeli military operations. Unexpected findings included the use of air strikes and firearm attacks on health buildings that remained constant over time, including the relatively high number of attacks in the West Bank compared to Gaza, suggesting a broader strategy of Israeli destabilization and occupation.
The data reveals a grim reality: the healthcare system in Palestine has been systematically dismantled, leading to a dire humanitarian crisis that has stripped away the fundamental health and human rights of all Palestinians.
Gaza's Healthcare System in Collapse: An Exploratory Analysis of Healthcare Attacks in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) and Israel since October 2023
Decades of apartheid practices and oppression in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), marked by mass displacement, restricted access to essential services, and countless human rights violations, have culminated in today's systematic dismantling of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. To investigate the systematic obstruction of healthcare access in OPT, this exploratory analysis employs an open intelligence dataset containing event data on reported healthcare attack incidents in OPT and Israel since October 2023. Specifically, this analysis seeks to elucidate the nature and extent of healthcare attacks in OPT by answering student-defined research questions, based on a priori expectations around the data. The analysis confirms that the vast majority of the healthcare attacks occurred within OPT and were a direct repercussion of Israeli military operations. Unexpected findings included the use of air strikes and firearm attacks on health buildings that remained constant over time, including the relatively high number of attacks in the West Bank compared to Gaza, suggesting a broader strategy of Israeli destabilization and occupation.
The data reveals a grim reality: the healthcare system in Palestine has been systematically dismantled, leading to a dire humanitarian crisis that has stripped away the fundamental health and human rights of all Palestinians.