Saturday, June 29, 2024, 10 AM PDT / 1 PM EDT. The destruction of healthcare in Gaza: A scientific assessment of settler-colonial violence
Watch the event recording here.
About the speakers
Sawsan Abdulrahim, PhD, MPH is Professor of public health in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut. Her work centers human rights principles to illuminate and act upon social inequities in health across the life course, with a focus on refugee populations and labor migrants in the Arab region and beyond. She is the lead author of the Arab Watch Report 2023 on the Right to Health, a live document intended to inform policy and advocacy efforts toward achieving health for all in the Arab region. She is a Health and Human Rights Fellow with the Harvard FXB Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights.
A.Kayum Ahmed, PhD, LLB is a South African activist-scholar who serves as an Assistant Professor at Columbia University's school of public health. Previously, he worked on ensuring equitable global access to Covid-19 vaccines as Division Director at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) Public Health Program, and served as Chief Executive Officer of the South African Human Rights Commission. He is the author of a children's book entitled, "A is for Amandla: The ABC Guide for Young Revolutionaries [and their parents]". All proceeds from sales of the book are donated to the Palestine Festival of Literature.
Dennis Kunichoff, MPH is a statistician and data analyst with the Harvard University FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. He supports research teams across the Center, including the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, with quantitative analytic work and leads data projects aimed at making sense of critical inequities around the world. He is also a proud Moldovan Jew who stands firmly against the political ideology of Zionism, and against occupation, apartheid, and oppression in any form. He previously taught statistics courses for NYU’s School of Global Public Health and NYU’s Prison Education Program.
Bram Wispelwey, MD, MPH is a co-founder of Health for Palestine, a community organizing initiative in Palestinian refugee camps that seeks to maximize wellness and address health barriers via social accompaniment and creative integration with existing facilities. He is an Associate Physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and he also teaches at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Suggested readings
Asi, Y, Mills, D, Greenough, PG, et al. ‘Nowhere and no one is safe’: spatial analysis of damage to critical civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip during the first phase of the Israeli military campaign, 7 October to 22 November 2023. Confl Health 18, 24 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-024-00580-x
Wispelwey B, Mills D, Asi YM, et al. ‘Civilian mortality and damage to medical facilities in Gaza BMJ Global Health 2024;9:e014756. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-014756