The territory’s first cases of community transmission of the virus have raised fears it will spread quickly and worsen an already devastated economy.
Just as a graduation for 400 students was breaking up on Monday night in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a university official rushed to the stage of the brightly lit soccer stadium and took the microphone to address the crowd of Palestinian families, few wearing masks. The authorities had just reported four new cases of Covid-19 in the territory, a place that had yet to report a single case of community spread. Every known patient had contracted the virus while traveling elsewhere — but these four had not. “We ask you not to spend additional time here,” pleaded the official, Said al-Namrouti, urging people who gathered for the Islamic University’s education college graduation to go home immediately. “There’s an exceptional situation outside the stadium related to the coronavirus.” The discovery of the first four cases of community transmission of the virus deep inside Gaza set off an epidemiological investigation into the outbreak’s source, and prompted Hamas, the militant group that governs the territory, to impose a 48-hour curfew, a first step in the effort to control the outbreak. But it has also raised fears that the pandemic could spread quickly in the densely populated enclave, exacerbating the already dire economic situation confronting its nearly two million residents. On Tuesday, the Health Ministry reported two new cases of local transmission, which it said were not linked to the first four. Experts warned that Gaza’s health sector, already devastated by years of war and conflict, lacked the resources to deal with a widespread outbreak. Gerald Rockenschaub, the head of the World Health Organization’s mission, said Gaza’s medical institutions have only about 100 adult ventilators, most of which were already in use, and noted that authorities were in need of more test kits. “For years, the situation has been going from bad to worse,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. “If we need to shut down for several weeks, I’m worried we could be heading for a disaster.” Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on the movement of goods and people into and out of Gaza have contributed to the devastation of its economy, with poverty widespread and unemployment around 45 percent.
