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WHO headquarters’ erasure of the Palestinian people from World Health Statistics 2022 and previous issues of World Health Statistics, as noted by Richard Horton,1 is both unacceptable and insulting. This needs to be addressed and remedied as soon as possible. How can WHO’s leadership not recognise the existence of a people in this world? How can it deny Palestinian existence in some publications when WHO’s Director-General explicitly links movement restrictions, demolitions, displacements, and the use of excessive force against Palestinians as social determinants of health?1
If WHO is serious about the social determinants of health and not merely paying lip service to this vital concept, it should not be placing barriers on the availability of data to assess and monitor progress in the Palestinian people’s health and social conditions by pretending that an entire people simply does not exist.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 organisations2 and, ironically, other WHO publications such as World Health Assembly reports3 and the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office reports.4
Erasure and exclusion from history and from the present continue to be used against the Palestinian people as a weapon of war—a war in which even basic data on life and health are perceived as a threat, a threat to the uncovering of the truth: that Palestinians are here to stay. Ignoring their existence by obliterating them from World Health Statistics is in itself harmful to the Palestinian people’s health and foregoes the opportunity to demonstrate the negative impact of political and social determinants related to Israeli occupation, chronic exposure to violence, and difficult overall conditions for Palestinian people’s health. Is this evidence not worth highlighting in World Health Statistics?
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