How Israel is weaponizing infectious diseases in Gaza
Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after the Israeli army destroyed most of the hospital’s medical equipment during the war on Gaza on 31 December 2025
Salman Khan reports in Mondoweiss on 3 May 2026:
I met a young man in his twenties in the intensive care unit at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was the victim of an Israeli rocket attack three weeks earlier near the yellow line. His left leg was amputated above the knee, and the part of the extremity that remained had multiple external fixators in place; he also had multiple other lacerations and suffered severe abdominal trauma requiring open laparotomy, bowel resection, and ostomy placement. He was intubated and had developed a ventilator-associated pneumonia with a multidrug-resistant bacterium called Acinetobacter. He was on a combination of antibiotics that would probably be ineffective.
In Gaza, there is a lot of what we infectious disease specialists refer to as “drug-bug mismatch”—patients often get placed on antibiotics that are ineffective against the offending pathogen due to a limited antibiotic arsenal and a growing antibiotic resistance crisis.
Due in part to ongoing restrictions on the entry of lifesaving medicines by the Israeli Occupation, the antibiotic supply is severely limited in Gaza, often changing week to week based on availability of donations from the World Health Organization. Patients unnecessarily die from often treatable infections because of delays in receiving effective antibiotic therapy.