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December 2nd, 2020 
Awake Goy 
Palestine saw the highest rate of daily infections of the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic in the past 24 hours, following the first weekend of newly imposed lockdowns in the West Bank.
According to numbers from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, there were 2,536 new cases of the virus in the past 24 hours, and a record 16 deaths, raising the death rate to 838 people.
The new cases put the total number of COVID-19 cases in Palestine past 101,000, with more than 20,000 active cases of the virus. The majority of the new cases in the West Bank were reported in the Nablus district, with 336 new cases, followed by the Hebron districts with 226.
Of the 16 deaths, the majority were reported in the Gaza Strip, where there were more than 800 new cases reported since yesterday. One of those 800 new people with coronavirus was reported as Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza.
The worsening situation in Gaza, where the majority of families live under the poverty line, has become a major cause for concern for Palestinian health officials there, who say that 70 percent of hospital beds in ICU’s across Gaza are occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Over the weekend, Gaza health officials reported that 109 COVID-19 patients were on ventilators. By Tuesday, that number had increased to 132.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the collapse of Gaza’s health infrastructure has been one of the major fears shared by Palestinian health officials across the board.
Due to more than a decade of siege, Gaza’s hospitals are severely understaffed and underfunded, and don’t have the capacity to handle a full blown COVID-19 outbreak among the territory’s population, many of whom live in crowded refugee camps and neighborhoods devastated by three Israeli offensives in the past 12 years.
Gaza’s leaders have refrained from enforcing another lockdown, like the one we’ve seen in the West Bank, due to the fact that Gaza already has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world — a terrible reality that has only worsened because of the pandemic.
The prospect of a lockdown can be a double-edged sword in Gaza: while it could help reduce the rate of infection and contain the virus, it almost certainly would spell disaster for Gaza’s already flailing economy and cause thousands of families to go hungry.
Talk of a vaccine, and the reports that Israel has allegedly promised to designate millions of doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to Palestinians in the oPt, have been a cause for some hope among the Palestinian public, though its likely that it could be weeks, even months before we were to see a vaccine available to the public here.
Even if, or when, the vaccines are supposed to arrive on Palestine’s doorsteps, health officials are already predicting that it will once again be Palestinians in Gaza who will suffer, as officials warn that we could see a severe shortage in the availability of vaccines to the territory.
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