Isreal’s war on Gaza has made finding medication nearly impossible for people trying to survive in the region, and Palestinians living with HIV have been hit particularly hard.
According to The Intercept, aid groups like Glia say that HIV medication has specifically been blocked from entering Gaza, though Isreal’s agency for the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories denies the allegation. “Israel neither blocks nor limits the entry of medications, including those for HIV, which can be brought in without quantitative restrictions,” the agency told the outlet.
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But Dr. Tarek Loubani, a Palestinian Canadian emergency physician with Glia told The Intercept that Israel has treated caches of medication “basically like weapons depots.” He alleges that the Israeli military has burned medication warehouses and posted snipers outside others.
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Earlier this week, prior to news that Isreal and Hamas were close to a ceasefire agreement, The Intercept published a long piece detailing one queer HIV-positive Palestinian man’s struggle to get vital medication amid the ongoing horrors in the region over the past year.
The 27-year-old, identified as E.S., uses a walker for mobility so was forced to remain in Gaza City rather than fleeing south to Rafah like many of his neighbors. He’s also been diagnosed with neurosyphilis and requires not only common antiretrovirals used to treat HIV, but also the more rarely prescribed lopinavir/ritonavir. The violence in the region since October 2023 has caused food as well as medication shortages, exacerbating E.S.’s mobility issues.
E.S. was able to obtain a three-month supply of his medication in November 2023. The following March, as his supply dwindled, he began reaching out on social media hoping to find a way to access more medication. In July, his brother made a dangerous trip to E.S.’s doctor’s home and secured enough pills to last until October 2024. E.S. began rationing his medication, fearing that there would be none left in Northern Gaza when his supply ran out.
In August, he lost contact with his doctor. “For the past ten months, I was lucky,” he wrote the following month. “I had access to my HIV medication because I stayed in the north of Gaza. But now, I’m running out. I took the last doses in the north.”
By early October, E.S. was in touch with Loubani from Glia, who had procured three bottles of lopinavar/ritonavir pills in Canada. But Loubani’s team was first denied entry into neighboring Jordan. Then a three-month supply of meds that Glia was able to get to the Gaza border was later confiscated, and Israel reportedly banned the organization, along with five other medical NGOs, from entering Gaza. (In an October 30 press release, Glia announced that Israel had lifted the ban.)
E.S. and his family were forced to relocate to another part of Gaza City in mid-October, after a missile struck their home. Later that month, however, E.S. reconnected with his doctor, who managed to get him more of his medication — albeit in doses produced for children. And early last month Loubani told him he had finally gotten a three-month supply of lopinavar/ritonavir into Gaza. E.S. currently has enough medication to last him a few months.
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