The academic community must develop a strong position to shield journals, their editors, and staff, against pressure to enforce censorship.
In March 2020, The Lancet published a letter we wrote alerting the medical community to the dangers of a covid-19 outbreak in the Gaza Strip. We warned that the pandemic had “the potential to devastate one of the world’s most vulnerable populations.” [1] Since then, this fear has become reality and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have now endured a fifth largescale Israeli military assault that has killed 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, injured nearly 2,000, and internally displaced some 107,000 people. [2,3]
As we highlighted in our letter, decades of structural violence targeting Palestinian people have brought Gaza’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. [4] A densely populated area, the majority of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are refugees denied their right of return since 1948. [5] Meanwhile, Israel’s illegal closure and blockade of Gaza since 2007, amounting to collective punishment, have meant that supplies for covid-19 testing, treatment, and vaccination have been severely limited. [6,7] …..more