As Israel continues its mass vaccination campaign, the fastest in the world, to reopen bars, gyms and museums a few kilometers away, hospitals in the occupied West Bank are crumbling under the influx of new patients with the disease. Covid-19, for lack of vaccine.

The contrast is striking.

On the one hand, more than 4.3 million people (46% of the Israeli population) received the two doses of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, with the added bonus of extended deconfinement on March 7 with the reopening of restaurants.

On the other, we refine ourselves.

Israel has vaccinated more than 90,000 Palestinians with permits to work in Israel or settlements in the occupied West Bank, out of the 100,000 or so that it planned to immunize.

>> To see: Covid-19: Russian vaccine Sputnik V arrives in the West Bank

As of March 11, the West Bank had received just over 30,000 doses of vaccine - including 2,000 of the 5,000 doses promised by Israel for medical personnel - for its 2.8 million people.

For the first time since the start of the pandemic, the number of daily cases in the occupied West Bank these days slightly exceeds that recorded for all of Israel, pushing hospitals to their ultimate limit.

In the emergency room of the Ramallah medical complex, an eight-year-old girl infected with the virus struggles with her oxygen tube, a sixty-year-old in intensive care watches passers-by and patients moan, noted an AFP journalist who did not been allowed to film.

"We have reached the red line"

The service is overwhelmed and the air overwhelmed by a foul odor.

The health authorities had to equip three large caravans outside to cope with the influx of patients.

"Sometimes we wait for a patient to die to be able to admit those who congregate in the emergency room," notes a hospital official who requested anonymity.

This hospital in the main city of the West Bank, located about twenty kilometers from Jerusalem, is not a unique case.

The Palestinian Authority announced this week that the local health system has exceeded its capacity.

"We have reached the red line," said Mai al-Kaila, Palestinian Minister of Health.

"The epidemiological situation is very dangerous due to the wide spread of the virus."

>> To read: Covid -19 in Israel: a flash vaccination campaign with promising effects

The director of Dora Hospital in Hebron, Dr Mohammed Rabei, also said he was overwhelmed despite a capacity increased from 60 to 80 beds.

But hospitalizations keep increasing and "we must find other solutions" to treat the seriously ill with the coronavirus, he told AFP.

"There has always been a shortage of staff here, but these days the teams are working under pressure, lacking days off, are exhausted," he explains.

In Silwad, north of Ramallah, Palestinian Americans donated more than fifty oxygen machines - about $ 1,000 each - so that patients could be treated at home.

First delivery of Covax vaccines

"About ten residents here died at the Ramallah medical center and at the Chavez hospital (also in Ramallah), so new patients refuse to go to hospitals," said Osama Hammad, mayor of this city.

"We had no choice but to ask for oxygen machines to keep the sick, treat them in the local clinic, rather than let them go to die in big hospitals," says Osama Hammad, whose city has was cordoned off for two days to stop the spread of the virus.

At the start of the vaccination campaign in Israel in December, NGOs such as Amnesty International and Palestinian officials called on Israel to extend its vaccination campaign in the West Bank, a territory occupied since 1967 by the Jewish state.

But Israel refused, believing it was under no obligation to provide vaccines to Palestinians, and provided doses only for medical personnel in the West Bank and for Palestinian employees in Israel or the settlements.

Israel has access to rapid supplies through an exclusive agreement with US giant Pfizer.

The Palestinian Authority is awaiting the delivery of 100,000 doses from China and millions more from the Covax system to aid the poorest countries.

Some 60,000 doses of Pfizer / BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines allocated to Palestinians under this program arrived Wednesday morning at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, according to an Israeli security source.

With AFP

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