Gaza Recovery, Marburg in Rwanda, and National Security and Global Health
October 11, 2024
Editors' Note
Monday marked one year since Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Israel's counteroffensive has resulted in more than 41,000 deaths, the displacement of 1.9 million people, and the shutdown of more than half of Gaza's primary health-care centers.
Reflecting on the changes since October 7, Shira Efron, senior director of policy research at Israel Policy Forum, discusses how over the past year, the entire humanitarian-aid supply chain for Gaza—from donor to beneficiary—has been plagued by broad structural, procedural, and political challenges. Efron outlines a path for addressing those shortcomings as the winter approaches.
Unpacking the tertiary effects of the Israel-Hamas war, Ilana Seff and Cyril Bennouna from Washington University in St. Louis examine the conflict's mental health toll among the Arab, Jewish, and Muslim diaspora youth, and what communities could do to support them.
Next, CFR's Christina Bouri describes how the recent pager explosions in Lebanon are worsening the country's deeply rooted mental health crisis.
Switching continents, Craig Spencer—an emergency medicine physician, Ebola survivor, and CFR member—explores Rwanda's Marburg virus outbreak and outlines what to expect over the coming weeks.
A group of contributors led by Pallabi Deb, senior program manager for the HIV Vaccine Trials Network at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, calls on public-private partnerships to ensure equitable access to lenacapavir, an HIV treatment with a 96% efficacy rate.
Responding to Daniel W. Drezner's recent argument in Foreign Affairs that elevating "everything" to a national security priority, ensures "nothing" is a priority, CFR Senior Fellow David P. Fidler argues that the "temptation to frame pandemics and climate change as threats to U.S. national security is still strong."
Until next week!—Nsikan Akpan, Managing Editor, and Caroline Kantis, Associate Editor
