An atmosphere of acute fear is sweeping through Palestinian life in occupied East Jerusalem as Israeli government measures enforced to limit the spread of the Corona virus have increased the community’s experience of isolation, dispossession, powerlessness and acute poverty.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, chair and professor in the Social Work and Law Faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University in London and a leading Palestinian social-worker and socio-legal scholar, is a resident of the Old City. She spoke during a Zoom meeting of the unparalleled situation of fear and desperation on every front she is seeing
According to her, senior Palestinian officials – the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs and the Governor of Jerusalem – have been arrested, and then released, with the condition that, they “do not work for the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem and do not wander in the city for 14 days". Community initiatives to distribute food parcels have been violently disrupted; education is completely fragmented with children at home, some of them with neither laptops nor wifi, and now often hungry since schools are closed; the six Palestinian hospitals’ supplies of equipment and medicine were already precarious and have further deteriorated after 2018 due to the American decision to cut $25 million in funding to East Jerusalem hospitals. No one has any illusion they could confront a wave of Coronavirus acute patients.
