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East Ghouta 'Truce' Must Include Evacuation Of Hundreds Of Sick And Wounded
Hundreds of desperately ill people in East Ghouta, including dozens injured in the recent bombing campaign, must be provided with immediate medical evacuation as part of any proposed truce, says the International Rescue Committee. The humanitarian agency also calls for the sustained, safe passage of medicine, medical supplies, food, as well as the provision of essential services to East Ghouta, and an urgent response to the current malnutrition crisis gripping the area.
BEIRUT
Hundreds of desperately ill people in East Ghouta, including dozens injured in the recent bombing campaign, must be provided with immediate medical evacuation as part of any proposed truce, says the International Rescue Committee. The humanitarian agency also calls for the sustained, safe passage of medicine, medical supplies, food, as well as the provision of essential services to East Ghouta, and an urgent response to the current malnutrition crisis gripping the area.
The latest round of Syrian peace talks in Geneva has included a proposed 48-hour truce in East Ghouta, which has seen two weeks of increased bombardment, resulting in dozens of civilian deaths and injuries. IRC health partners In East Ghouta estimate that there are around 450 people in desperate need of medical evacuation but haven't been given permission to leave. The list includes cancer patients and those needing kidney dialysis, as well as civilians badly injured in the recent bombing campaign. The IRC has been told that medical staff in East Ghouta are stretched to their greatest extent since the siege first began.
Thomas Garofalo, International Rescue Committee's Middle East Public Affairs Director, said: "A two-day truce is not nearly enough for civilians facing grave violations of international law - including bombardment and besiegement -- but it is a window of opportunity to save the lives of the most desperately in need of treatment. It would also allow aid convoys of food and medicine reach areas that have not seen any relief for many months."
Nearly 400,000 people have lived under siege in East Ghouta for the past four years. A tightening of the siege in recent months has left the population cut off from food and medicine, and caused a rocketing of food prices, leaving over a thousand children malnourished. Six IRC supported health facilities in East Ghouta have treated hundreds of malnourished children.
The intensity of the current bombardment has compounded the medical disaster in East Ghouta because it means people are too scared to travel to seek treatment as well as make it too dangerous for safely move around fuel and other essential needed for health clinics to fully operate.
Residents in East Ghouta told the IRC in November that the siege is impacting on children the most. Around a quarter of children unable to get to school, often because they need to work to help support their families or because the journey is simply too dangerous.
For more information, arrange interviews or be provided with case studies and photos (see below), contact: Paul Donohoe, International Rescue Committee's Senior Media Officer, Beirut, on paul.donohoe@rescue.org or +961 81 757 175.
The International Rescue Committee responds to the world's worst humanitarian crises and helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster to survive, recover, and gain control of their future.
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The US is at risk of losing its measles-eradicated status early next year, according to Scientific American.
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US Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Friday demanded that the Trump administration "stop lying and follow the science" as an outbreak of measles in South Carolina grew and officials warned that low vaccination rates in the affected area likely mean the crisis will continue worsening.
Since the outbreak began in October in Spartanburg County, near the state's northern border, the highly infectious disease has sickened at least 129 people. The vast majority of people who have been infected have not been inoculated against measles, which is 97% preventable via the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot—which has been erroneously attacked for years by anti-vaccine activists including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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“That’s a significant amount of time,” Linda Bell, the state's epidemiologist, said at a recent press conference. “Vaccination continues to be the best way to prevent the disruption that measles is causing to people’s education, to employment.”
But Spartanburg County's ongoing outbreak is being driven by “lower-than-hoped-for vaccination coverage,” Bell said.
Public health experts consider a 95% vaccination rate to be the level at which the spread of measles can be eliminated in a community. Only about 90% of students in the county had all required childhood immunizations. South Carolina allows religious exemptions for school immunization requirements. Many of the schools where students have quarantined have vaccination rates "well below 90%," the New York Times reported.
Across South Carolina, MMR vaccination rates among schoolchildren has fallen significantly since 2020, from 96% to 93.5%.
Kennedy has been a longtime denier of vaccine science. In 2019, his anti-vaccine group, Children's Health Defense, tried to sue New York state over its vaccine requirement, which is one of just five in the country that doesn't allow for nonmedical exemptions.
In April, Kennedy visited a Texas community where two unvaccinated children had died of measles and acknowledged in a social media post that "the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine."
“Vaccination continues to be the best way to prevent the disruption that measles is causing to people’s education, to employment.”
But during his visit he also promoted, without evidence, two therapeutic treatments that one vaccine expert told NPR are "valueless" in treating measles. In 2023 Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan that the vaccine was not linked to a decline in deaths.
He has recently continued fueling overall skepticism about immunizations, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel he assembled advising that newborn babies whose mothers test negative for hepatitis B should not receive a dose of a vaccine for the disease—sparking fear among public health experts that major progress in reducing childhood cases of the disease over the past three decades will be reversed.
In November the CDC website was changed to say a link between vaccines and autism—a theory that has long been debunked—cannot be ruled out. Two months earlier, as measles cases surged in another outbreak around the Utah-Arizona border, Trump called for combination children's vaccines like the MMR to be split up into separate shots—a call made decades ago by Dr. Andrew Wakefield, who lost his medical license over his 1988 study that linked autism to the combination vaccine, which was later retracted.
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The worsening measles outbreak in South Carolina, said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), "is yet another horrifying consequence of Trump and RFK Jr.'s Make America Sick Agenda."
Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has urged residents to be vaccinated against measles, but said on Thursday, "We are not going to do mandates on people to go get vaccinated."
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Diving into specifics, Duckworth explained that the administration has been justifying its boat-bombing spree by arbitrarily declaring suspected drug traffickers as being part of "designated terrorist organizations," which the senator noted was "not grounded in US statute nor international law, but in solely what Trump says."
Many other legal experts have called the administration's strikes illegal, with some going so far as to call them acts of murder.
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