If you were living in Gaza, you might be dead now or extremely ill.  

I just looked up the prescription drugs that most Canadians rely on, if they are age 40 to 59, and those aged 60-79.

Few to none are available in Gaza now.  They might have been two or three months ago, but now prescription drugs, live saving medicines, and even aspirin are unobtainable.

In Canada, seven in ten adults age 40 to 59 used one prescription drug in the last 30 days, and one in five used more than five prescription drugs in the last 30 days. 

Chances are you, or your friend or colleague rely on these drugs to stay alive. Imagine being a Type Two diabetic in Gaza – there’s likely no Metformin available let alone the myriad of other drugs used to treat the malady.  If someone is pre-diabetic (as are nearly 5% of Canadian adults) there is no hope of having a middling to good diet to combat the disease either. People can and do die of poorly or untreated diabetes. 

Something as simple and cheap as over-the-counter analgesics, aspirin, naproxyn, ibuprofen and the like which many of us use almost daily, are non-existent even in what remains of destroyed hospitals in Gaza.  Morphine and post-operative drugs don’t exist.  Hence we read about children especially who have had their legs amputated with little or no pain relief.  

“The degree of pain, unmanaged post-operatively, would be absolutely unimaginable.”

Dr Deirdre Nunan, Canadian orthopedic surgeon who did three terms of service in Gaza

Dr Deirdre Nunan, a Canadian orthopedic surgeon from Saskatchewan, said she can’t stomach the idea of patients who lost a limb not receiving pain medicine. She’s been to Gaza three times between 2019 and 2022 with Doctors Without Borders.

“The degree of pain, unmanaged post-operatively, would be absolutely unimaginable.” she said in an interview with CBC News in January. . 

Nunan said recovery from an amputation is a long process — starting with initial surgery that would normally be done in a sterile environment, with painkillers.  She says that operations like these in non-sterile precarious conditions set patients at risk for infections that lead to secondary surgeries. There is a need for prosthetics and social/psychological supports. “Absolutely none of that is something that exists in Gaza at the moment,” said Nunan. 

But this is far away from our middle-aged bodies requiring common and cheap drugs to fight high cholesterol, or hypertension.  If we need the drugs, so do the Palestinians.  8.8% of Canadians 40-49 use anti-depressants, and 10% use pain killers.  While those 60-79 don’t seem to use anti-depressants (probably due to the fact most are no longer working in stressful jobs) 34.3% of older Canadians use lipid lowering drugs, and ACE inhibitors to help their hearts.  

In Canada, we’re talking about a relatively healthy population that depends on the drugs listed in the above table – not a population in which 25 people have starved to death from malnutrition in the last few days in a northern Gaza hospital. According to a report on AlJazeera, in Gaza 10,000 cancer patients are at risk of death, and 350,000 patients with chronic illnesses are at significant risk. Tens of thousands more up and down the Gaza strip are severely weakened by dehydration and malnutrition.  

Let’s think for a minute about the ‘heart-warming’ true World War I experience of British and German soldiers in ‘no man’s land’ on Christmas Day in 1914. During a ceasefire, soldiers reached across to shake one another’s hands, share some food and trade souvenirs for a couple of days over Christmas.

Today begins the holy month of Ramadan.  Muslims in Gaza are preparing to fast in the daytime, and feast after dark. Ramadan is part of their identity, their culture and an example of their human spirit.  Western countries, including Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and their European “allies”, could care less. Yet 110 years ago, at Christmas diehard foes were willing to pay some respect to the tenets of a shared Christianity at Christmastime. 

But western racism knows no bounds – what do we care about Muslims and their faith? Who cares if it’s Ramadan?

“Occupying, deporting, and settling”

No one will stop Israel sending missiles and bombs to kill and maim Palestinians day in, and day out because Israel is hell bent on “occupying, deporting, and settling” as Israeli soldiers claim in a video that shows them standing arm in arm, machine guns over their shoulders in front of a ruin of a house in Gaza. The Israeli Knesset (parliament) is overwhelmingly on board with that – as MK Tzvi Sukkot of the right-wing Jewish Power Party said, “We first need to occupy, to annex, to destroy all the houses there, and build [Jewish] neighbourhoods [in Gaza].”  

The killing and maiming could stop with one word from US President Biden.  And he could cut all funds going to Israel now. 

Canada’s government has been turning its gaze away from the genocide of more than  30,000 Gazans, and the 72,000 plus seriously injured by US-supplied arms to Israel.  And we in Canada are no slouches.  Some Canadian media outlets have noted that since 7 Oct 2023 the Canadian government has approved new export permits for tens of millions of dollars worth of  “non lethal” military equipment to Israel.  Spineless Liberal MPs whine that  we are not sending “full weapon systems.” But that is just nonsense.  Rifle scopes, bullets, drones, and tank parts build and fuel the deadly Israeli war machine. 

As Kelsey Gallagher, a researcher at the Canadian peace institute Project Ploughshares notes, the vast majority of Canada’s military exports to Israel come in the form of three types of parts and components:

1.  electronics and space equipment. For example, in 2022, $10.4 million of Canada’s total of $21 million in military exports to Israel consisted of goods related to electronic equipment.
2. military aerospace exports and components
3. bombs, missiles, rockets and general military explosives and components

Gazans have little to no access to Rx

Palestinians have no access to health care beyond kind words by their caregivers and doctors. There are no drugs, no medicines and no analgesics.  Yet those over age 40 in Gaza suffer from all the same medical issues we in Canada do.  Plus they suffer from bullets, bombings, missiles that cause raging fires, being trapped in their homes — if they still have them — after an air strike. They face starvation and the sheer terror of knowing their lives might be shorter than those of a mayfly —  that is a couple of days. 

NB

While it doesn’t exactly shorten lives, for women having to live on dirt floors in tents with no access to clean water, toilets, pads and privacy during menstruation is unbearable –as this article says.

Cartoon at the top: Cartoon by Peter Brookes, for The Times – credit Cartoon Movement, Amsterdam, Netherlands (CWS/CARTOONARTS INTERNATIONAL http://www.cartoonweb.com)