The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the already incalculable costs of conflict, disease and failing states in parts of the Middle East. Even when a vaccine finally arrives for people in these areas, which will likely be much later than other parts of the region and the globe, the layered effects of disease on top of crisis may be irreparable.
A flurry of recent reports and Al-Monitor articles document the challenges ahead in some of the most difficult parts of the Middle East — Gaza, Yemen, Syria — in language that is about stark and alarming as one can imagine.