Drug-Resistant Pathogens Plague Gaza

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GPM # 106

Israel-USA’s genocidal war on Gaza drags on.

Sixty-one thousand have been killed by US bombs and missiles. Some German and British ordnance in there.

Indirect deaths — from infectious disease, chronic disorders that can no longer be treated (due to Israel-USA’s blockade), and malnutrition — may bring that number to 200,000. Over 150,000 have been injured.

Israel-USA’s wanton destruction of Gaza’s health care system — infrastructure and personnel — has given rise to a new term: ‘medicide’.

The most recent figures from the World Health Organization tell the story:

Half of the 36 hospitals operating in Gaza before October 7, 2023 have been destroyed. The other half are partially functional, overwhelmed with the injured and refugees.

Two-thirds of little Gaza’s primary health care facilities have been demolished. In North Gaza, home to an estimated million souls at this moment (people Israel-USA wants to forcible expel), one partially functional hospital remains.

As if the situation in Gaza weren’t sufficiently appalling – two years into a war widely described as genocidal, by people who know what genocide is and have the honesty to use the word (too many to cite here) — Gaza is now swept by infectious pathogens few if any drugs can treat.

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In a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, a half-dozen strains of multidrug-resistant bacteria have been described, isolated from 1300 tissue specimens gathered at one of Gaza’s sole surviving microbiology units, at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City, between November 2023 and the end of August, 2024.

Among the strains of drug-resistant bacteria the researchers identified, notorious wound pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella, and E. coli.

Two-thirds of all isolates were resistant to multiple antibiotics, from different drug classes (a benchmark for establishing ‘multidrug resistance’), indicating “sustained selection pressure.”

In other words, prevailing conditions in Gaza are ‘selecting for’, and therefore driving the emergence of resistant strains of virulent bacteria few if any drugs will treat.

Conditions are also ripe for the spread of these diseases.

Crowded field hospital wards, squalid tent encampments, and the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s sewage and freshwater systems are a perfect storm for the spread of diseases no drug will treat.

To make the situation even more acute, antibiotics are in short supply in Gaza. So are wound irrigation fluids and sterile dressings, and the materials needed to culture bacteria, in order to establish the best antibiotics to treat them.

Sixteen percent of Pseudomonas samples examined by the Lancet study’s authors were resistant to the drug colistin, the drug of last resort when all others fail. The last remaining bullet.

“The international medical community has a duty to act and respond to this crisis,” the authors of the Lancet piece write.

“First and foremost, healthcare workers and governments worldwide must advocate for the cessation of the Israeli military invasion that has resulted in a surge of trauma injuries and the widespread deliberate targeting of hospitals, laboratories, and water desalination plants; without this ceasefire, the infection burden will escalate further.”

The GPM spoke with one of the authors of the Lancet report.

Bilal Irfan is a bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, and a researcher at the medical school’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, specializing in conflict health. Irfan has been collaborating with Palestinian medical students and physicians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza in the documentation of Israeli medicide.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

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And here’s another Lancet piece, released on August 18, 2025, lead author Bilal Irfan, entitled “Is Gaza still a place for newborn life?”