Though tiny, pathogens could become Israel’s deadliest weapon in Gaza
Palestinians crowd a coastal path west of Beit Lahia after receiving aid parcels on 29 July 2025, in conditions health experts warn could fuel deadly disease outbreaks
Carlyn Zwarenstein writes in Middle East Eye on 9 August 2025 :
Even as it continues to bomb the Palestinian civilians it is starving, Israel is pushing ahead with what may be its ultimate – or perhaps penultimate – vision for Gaza: the physical confinement of survivors in a guarded zone on Rafah’s rubble – an actual concentration camp.
If it is not stopped, pathogens could yet become Israel’s deadliest weapon in Gaza.
Disease is often not merely a side effect but a major agent in genocides, from smallpox that devastated the Indigenous peoples of the Americas to the barracks of Auschwitz. Concentration camps in particular have a long and ghastly history as places where, by design or otherwise, disease kills as many as – or even more than – those directly killed by the genocidal regime that confines them.
In the Napoleonic Wars, British soldiers died of infectious disease eight times more often than of combat wounds, while the American Civil War saw some 600,000 deaths from malaria, dysentery and other infectious diseases.
Cramming a demoralised, traumatised and severely malnourished population into a small area with little or no infrastructure makes the spread of disease in conflict settings even more dangerous. This is now taking shape in Gaza, as Israeli forces forcibly concentrate roughly 2.3 million genocide survivors into an ever-smaller area.
Acutely starving survivors of what Amnesty International calls “a live-streamed genocide” are next to be forced into the space until recently occupied by the city of Rafah, once former US President Joe Biden’s untouchable “red line” – now 64 sqkm of debris and human remains.
This is not happening incidentally.
Following the broad lines of an idea first floated by Defence Minister Israel Katz, this tiny “humanitarian city” is to contain an initial 600,000 heavily vetted survivors (that is, those not selected at entry for detention, or executed point blank), then the remaining surviving population of Gaza – creating a potential population density of nearly 35,938 people per square kilometre.
In such an environment, even minor infections can become fatal, turning treatable illnesses into mass killers.