As images of emaciated children and starving people emerge from Gaza, global attention is slowly turning to a disaster that is neither accidental nor new. This emergency webinar will examine the scale and depth of the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza—its roots in the ongoing genocide, years of siege, and systematic deprivation—and its devastating impact on the physical and mental health of Palestinians, particularly children, both now and for years to come.
Our speakers will discuss how this famine is being experienced on the ground, how it was made possible, and what must happen now to address both the immediate humanitarian crisis and its long-term consequences for future generations.
Bushra Khalidi is the Palestinian Territory Policy Lead at Oxfam and a seasoned humanitarian policy expert specializing in protection, humanitarian access, and accountability under international law. With a career grounded in strategic advocacy and principled communications, she has been at the forefront of shaping Oxfam’s policy responses to the crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. Her work focuses on influencing decision-makers, engaging with international institutions, and advancing rights-based approaches to humanitarian action. As a Palestinian humanitarian worker, Bushra brings both professional expertise and lived experience to her advocacy. She plays a critical role in bridging local realities with global policy spaces, ensuring that Palestinian civil society, grassroots organizations, and community leaders are meaningfully represented in international fora. Bushra has led high-level advocacy initiatives on ceasefire efforts, the protection of humanitarian space, and ending settlement trade, always centering Palestinian voices, agency, and the call for self-determination.
Yara M. Asi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Global Health Management and Informatics. Her research agenda focuses on global health, human rights, and development in fragile populations. She is a 2020-2021 Fulbright US Scholar to the West Bank and was the Fall 2021 US Fellow at Al Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network. She has presented at multiple national and international conferences on topics related to global health, food security, health informatics, and women in healthcare, and has published extensively on health and well-being in fragile and conflict-affected populations in journal articles and book chapters. Her work has also been featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, +972 Magazine, The Conversation, Al Jazeera, The World, and other outlets.
Layth Malhis is a graduate student at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University and a volunteer with the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) in Washington, DC. He serves as a researcher on IPS’s Healthcare Destruction Platform team, which documents attacks on health infrastructure in Palestine. Previously, he was Operations Director at House of Jerusalem (بيت المقدس), an international initiative focused on promoting Palestinian agriculture. His research examines settler colonialism, health, and necropolitics in Palestine and the wider Arab world.
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