Week in Review: JVP Health Advisory Council Urgent Update & News Highlights
JVP Health Advisory Council Urgent Health Update, news highlights, videos, and events.
AUG 18
JVP Health Advisory Council Urgent Health Update: Consequences of war on Gaza, the West Bank/East Jerusalem, and Lebanon - August 15, 2026
Check out the latest Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council Urgent Health Report.
(7/8/26): Would you want a company that has facilitated genocide in Gaza having access to your private medical information? Palantir is in 21% of US hospitals. In a mini-documentary, the Financial Times examines Palantir which openly supports Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It also helps ICE target people for deportation. The company’s AI software centralizes vast amounts of personal data so that governments can track and surveil people. AFSC and JVP Health Advisory Council is part of a global movement pushing back. Watch the video.
If you live in New York, check out this important exhibit at the Whitney. Breathing in Public: A Palestinian Journey at the Whitney.“The exhibit opens with the Sawsan flower — the iris flower common in Palestine and also a common female name across the Arab world. The flower becomes both a symbol of femininity and rootedness. Toward the end of the film, words appear on screen: ‘to be unseen, to create an opening, to crawl, to breathe.’” Those words capture a distinctly Palestinian condition.
News Highlights
(2/3/26): This is an important overview and analysis of settler takeover and annexation of West Bank. Since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, land seizure in the West Bank has shifted from creeping settler encroachment to a vicious military-backed campaign of territorial theft. This commentary shows how the Israeli regime’s land appropriation policy in the West Bank, once justified through bureaucratic-legal land seizure orders, has now increasingly shifted toward direct settler takeovers, fully supported by the Israeli military.
While the US medical institutions and journals remain silent, the British Medical Journal calls out the imprisonment and torture of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya. How many times do we have to say to physicians, silence is complicity?
This is reprocide, the destruction of the next generation of Gazans, a central goal of genocide. Gaza recorded 3,958 miscarriages among pregnant women in the first half of 2026, according to Bassam Zaqout, director of Medical Relief in the Strip. Zaqout attributed the unprecedented rise to pregnant women being forced to travel over rough roads in unsafe transport, these same women facing constant terror from Israeli bombardment, being forced to sleep on the ground, and the lack of hot water and hygiene supplies in the Strip.
(7/29/26): The term reprocide is increasingly being used to describe the Israeli policy of not only killing Gazans, but destroying their ability to create generations going forward. A new report has warned that Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip is inflicting catastrophic harm on pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and newborns, leaving pregnancy increasingly dependent on “luck rather than care.” Published by the UK-based Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), the report, Pregnancy Under Fire: Reproductive Violence and the Destruction of Maternal Life in Gaza, draws on data from UN agencies and international humanitarian and medical organizations to document what it describes as the systematic destruction of maternal healthcare in the besieged enclave. According to the report, the consequences of the genocide will extend far beyond the current military assault, with malnutrition, forced displacement, and psychological trauma likely to shape the health and development of an entire generation of Palestinian children.
(8/2/26): The so-called ceasefire in Gaza is a farce as Israeli bombing and killing continues, but few are paying attention. Statistics collected by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights’ (PCHR) researchers indicate that the bombardment and destruction of homes have become a daily pattern, targeting entire residential blocks.
(8/7/26): These cancer patients who are unable to get treated will become the uncounted casualties of genocide. Gaza’s Health Ministry warned that an unprecedented shortage of cancer drugs has forced the suspension of chemotherapy protocols for breast, colorectal, gastrointestinal, head and neck cancers, sarcomas, and other tumors. Some life-saving drugs have been completely depleted, the ministry said, amid continued Israeli restrictions on the entry of aid and medical supplies into Gaza. Of Gaza’s 11,000 cancer patients, 4,000 have referrals for treatment abroad but remain waiting for Israeli approval to leave.
(8/7/26): Immigration jails have had hundreds of hunger strikes, but few make it into the mainstream media. “There’s a very long lineage and history of incarcerated people resisting as a form of survival, very much as a form of political activism once they’re incarcerated, and sometimes they work with people on the outside in solidarity, but still very much motivated by the people on the inside themselves.”