"WHO's erasure of Palestinians must cease"
Availability of data is vital to assess and monitor progress in the health of Palestinian people. Despite extremely limited resources and challenging atmosphere, medical research is alive in Palestine. A special issue was published by The Lancet journal titled “Research in the Occupied Palestinian Territory 2020”. But a vital health organisation needs to pay more attention to the health of Palestinians.
In a comment published in the Lancet in June 2022, Richard Horton demands that the “WHO’s erasure of Palestinians must cease”. He writes, that the WHO chose “to erase the existence of over 5 million people from its “comprehensive” assessment of world health—WHO's flagship World Health Statistics 2022. Despite being a member of WHO's Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMRO), the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt)—3·2 million people in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and 2·2 million people in the Gaza Strip—is absent from WHO's data. There is only one mention of the oPt: in a single chart of crude death rates for COVID-19. But elsewhere, in tables of indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals, annexes of global health estimates, and even in the list of EMRO members, the Palestinian people have been entirely erased. WHO is guilty of nothing less than statistical genocide—the deliberate elimination of a people with the aim of extinguishing their existence.”1
“It is not the lack of data that comes in the way of acknowledging the presence of the Palestinian people in World Health Statistics. In fact, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics is known for producing high-quality statistics that are used by various groups and organisations, including UN organisations and, ironically, other WHO publications such as World Health Assembly reports and the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office reports.”
Countries (who.int)