Middle East – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Dennis Kunichoff, David Mills, Yara Asi, Sawsan Abdulrahim, Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, A. Kayum Ahmed, Weeam Hammoudeh, Nadine Bahour, Mary T. Bassett, and P. Gregg Greenough.

After attacks in Israel led by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has featured an unprecedented scale of destruction. This has included the use of highly destructive weapons in a densely populated area. Mark-84 bombs (M-84s) are 2000 lb air-dropped explosive munitions with the capacity to damage infrastructure and kill or cause severe injury hundreds of meters away. This study examines the proximity of M-84 bomb detonations to hospital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. This article combined geospatial data on hospital locations across the Gaza Strip with maps of the locations of M-84 bomb craters between October 7 and November 17, 2023, published by CNN and New York Times. This study then measured and summarized the proximity of the bomb craters to hospitals across the territory. This article identified 592 M-84 bomb craters. Of the 36 hospitals across the Gaza Strip, 25% (n = 9) had at least one bomb crater within the lethal range (360 m) and 83.3% (n = 30) within the infrastructure damage and injury range (800 m) of their facilities. The shortest distance of a bomb crater from a hospital was 14.7 m. Two hospitals had as many as 23 and 21 bomb craters within 800 m of their facilities and one hospital had seven bomb craters within 360 m. Thirty-eight M-84 bombs were detonated within 800 m of hospitals in the Israeli military defined evacuation zone. Given the known blast effect of these M-84 bombs, the impact from the bomb detonations near hospitals likely killed and injured people in and around the hospital area, which could include civilians and hospital staff, and likely damaged hospital infrastructure. The results of this study suggest indiscriminate bombing in dangerous proximities to hospital infrastructure, which is afforded special protection under international humanitarian law (IHL)

Read the article here.

By Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai

This book develops a radically new way of understanding the social by focussing on different experiences we have of the everyday empirical reality. This book offers a new way of understanding the social processes of societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, all of which have complex experiences of the everyday social. The authors begin with the argument that the everyday social is the domain where the first experiences of the social are formed and these experiences influence to a great extent meaning-making of the structural social. Following a critique of some dominant trends in social ontology, they discuss in detail, and with many common examples, how the social is experienced through the perceptual capacities of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. They then discuss the relation between experience of belongingness and the social, and show how the social gets authority in a way similar to how natural gets authority in the natural sciences. Moreover, the social appears through the invocation of we-ness, suggestive of a social self. The everyday social also creates its sense of time, a social time which orders social experiences such as caste. Finally, the authors explain how the ethics of the social is formed through the relationship of Maitri (drawn from Ambedkar) between the different socials that constitute a society. This is not just a new theory of the social but is filled with illustrations from the everyday experiences of India, including the diverse experiences of caste.

Tag: Middle East

Are hospitals collateral damage? Assessing geospatial proximity of 2000 lb bomb detonations to hospital facilities in the Gaza Strip from October 7 to November 17, 2023