I decided to do this as a short diary instead of a comment in the Elie Wiesel diary.
Insufficiently reported has been the extent to which Israel's attacks on the infrastructure in Gaza amount to de facto biological warfare.
I'm not just making this up. Here is an excerpt from a 2003 article in the International Journal of Epidemiology, entitled "Biological warfare and the people of Iraq":
Third, the destruction of the Iraqi population’s ability to respond to outbreaks of infectious disease by restricting the import of essential medicines and medical equipment, by destroying the public health infrastructure, and by overwhelming the capacity of the healthcare system to respond effectively constitutes a further biological attack.
Fourth, having destroyed Iraq’s water and sanitation systems, leaving the civilian population highly vulnerable to major epidemics of infectious disease, the failure to restore the public health infrastructure and provide safe water supplies to homes and hospitals constitutes a biological attack. In this context, recent reports that reconstruction contracts may be awarded to the US company Bechtel are a particular cause for concern. In 1999, a Bechtel subsidiary took over the control of the public water system in Cochabamba in Bolivia and within weeks doubled and tripled the water rates for some of the poorest families in South America resulting in massive public demonstrations.7 Also, we must not forget that in the case of Afghanistan, despite the Bush administration’s claim that ‘the US will not walk away from the Afghan people’, the administration subsequently forgot to ask for any money for humanitarian and reconstruction costs in its 2003 budget.Source: http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/...
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I'm inspired to write this down after just seeing an alarming report on Al Jazeera America TV.
The Israelis destroyed the only power plant in Gaza. They bombed water and sewage treatment facilities. They've destroyed the landfill in Eastern Gaza. They've bombed hospitals and clinics. They bombed an ice cream factory, of all things, destroying medicine that was being refrigerated there.
