Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Agencies warn of looming health crisis in Lebanon

New Scientist 9th August 2006

Humanitarian agencies have warned of an impending health crisis in the beleaguered towns of southern Lebanon as the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel escalated.

Almost two-thirds of hospitals in the country could “cease to function” this week due to a shortage of fuel to run the generators, the World Health Organization said. The WHO has fuel shipments ready to be delivered but access has been hampered by the military situation.

The UN refugee agency accused Israel of bombing roads that had been designated for aid transportation. Southern Lebanon is “virtually unreachable”, said Antonio Gueterres, head of the UN’s refugee agency, adding that there were no safe areas in the entire country. Beirut has been reduced to rubble so transporting aid around has become impossible, he added.

The International Red Cross said that people in the city of Tyre were becoming increasingly desperate, with hundreds of civilians living in cramped shelters with very poor access to water.
“Ruthlessly exploited”

Israel’s foreign ministry has responded to the widespread criticism, saying that its army has a humanitarian operations room that is helping co-ordinate aid convoys to the south of Lebanon.

However, Roland Huguenin, at the International Red Cross, said that the country’s infrastructure was now so poor and unsafe that his agency could not reach survivors under the rubble of bombed buildings.

“What we saw in the past week of dead bodies lying around for more than 10 days is just unacceptable,” Huguenin told the BBC.

On Tuesday, a leading medical journal, The Lancet, called for an urgent meeting of health and development ministers to tackle the barriers preventing medical aid from reaching civilians. In an editorial published online, the journal heaped blame on Israel and Hezbollah: “Rarely has a humanitarian crisis been so deliberately and ruthlessly exploited at the expense of civilian populations.”
Cancer risk

Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has warned that a massive oil spill spreading down the coasts of Lebanon and Syria may pose a “heightened risk of cancer”. The estimated 30,000 tonnes of fuel polluting the coastline contains carcinogens such as benzenes.

It represents “a high-risk toxic cocktail made up of substances that cause cancer and damage to the endocrine system”, a UNEP spokesperson said.

The oil spill, which has also alarmed environmental groups, leaked from a plant 25 kilometres south of Beirut, after an attack by Israeli warplanes on 14 July.

According to the Lebanese government, nearly 1000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in the ongoing conflict. More than 100 Israelis, most of them soldiers, have also been killed.

The conflict has prompted a growing number of Israeli soldiers to enquire about having their sperm frozen. New Family, a family rights organisation, told AFP that at least 30 soldiers – mainly reservists – had approached them about the issue, to enable their families have offspring should they be killed in action.

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This entry was posted on 11 August, 2006 by in Empire, War and Terror, Health, Hegemon-watch, Israel, Israel Watch, Lebanon.

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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