Fidaa Talal Hijjy, 18, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 2007. At first she was treated at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, but with her health deteriorating, doctors told her she needed a bone marrow transplant – a procedure which is not available in the Gaza Strip.
Referred to Tel HaShomer Hospital in Israel on 20 August last year, Fidaa obtained an appointment for 23 September for a life-saving transplant, but the Israeli authorities did not respond to her application to cross into Israel, resulting in her missing the appointment.
As her health deteriorated further, she was given a new appointment for 20 October and submitted a new application to Israeli authorities be able to enter Israel, but yet again the Israeli authorities did not respond. Her last appointment was set on 9 November, but Israelis only responded three days later. By then Fidaa had died.
“The day of the funeral we got a call from the Palestinian liaison office saying the Israelis agreed that we should make a fourth appointment,” Amal Hijjy, a relative of Fidaa, said. “I said there’s no need to make another appointment because the girl died yesterday.”
Fidaa is only one of hundreds of Gazans who are refused permission to travel to Israel or other third countries every month for life-saving medical treatment. Last year, 27 Palestinian patients died while waiting for Israeli permits.
Specialised operations such as Fidaa’s, complex heart surgery and treatment for certain types of cancer are not available in Gaza, and patients are referred for treatment outside, but Israeli authorities repeatedly deny or delay exit permits.
According to the World Health Organisation, out of 1,103 applications submitted for travel to Israel last December, 21% had their applications denied or delayed, forcing them to miss their hospital appointments and restart the referral process.
“If that happened in my country, in the UK, in Europe, in Israel, if an individual who needed urgent treatment was unable to get out because of a bureaucratic obstacle, it would be a scandal,” said the head of the World Health Organisation for the Palestinian
Territories, Tony Laurance. “Here it happens to 300 or 400 people every month.”
He warned that while Gaza had a sophisticated health care system, this could not be sustained in isolation from the international community.
The Israeli closure of Gaza since Hamas seized power in mid 2007 and last year’s military offensive have led to a rapidly deteriorating health system. With limited supplies of drugs allowed into Gaza, there are often shortages of medicinals, while essential medical equipment such as x-ray machines, electronic devices and spare parts are next to impossible to bring in.
Even the ban on building materials is affecting essential health facilities – the new surgical wing in Gaza’s main Shifa hospital remains unfinished since 2006, while 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of 110 primary health care facilities that were damaged in the last war cannot be rebuilt. Meanwhile the blockade has kept doctors and nurses from pursuing advanced training.
Last Wednesday, the United Nations and over 80 international development agencies expressed their deep concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza, calling yet again on Israel to lift the crippling blockade.
“We are deeply concerned about the current health system in Gaza and in particular its capacity and ability to deliver proper standards of health care to the people of Gaza,” UN Humanitarian Coordinator Max Gaylard said. “This adverse situation is not like Haiti. Haiti has been destroyed by an earthquake. The circumstances here are entirely man-made and can be fixed accordingly.”
Journey to Gaza
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Gaza under attack
Even before the air raids, on Thursday morning, many Gazans were in a state of panic as thousands of leaflets dropped from Israeli fighter jets warned Palestinians not to get within 300 metres of the buffer zone with Israel.
The same leaflets, written in Arabic and including a map, exhort Palestinians to rise up against tunnel smugglers and provides an email and telephone number where they could snitch on them.
“Terrorists, tunnel owners, and the smugglers of military equipment know for certain that the continuation of terrorist attacks, the smuggling of military equipment, and the digging of tunnels will be targeted by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], but they continue to work in your residential areas and seek refuge among you,” the flier said. “The digging [of] tunnels under your houses and the smuggling of military equipment into Gaza constitutes a threat to your lives, the lives of your children, and family, and your property ... Do not stay idle and let the terrorists use you. They will not stand beside you when harm is done to you and your property. ... Take responsibility for your future.”
Few, if any Gazans take the calls by the Israeli army to tell on their compatriots seriously, but the warnings reminded many of the same experience during the war on Gaza a year ago, when they were warned to evacuate their neighbourhoods while nowhere was spared the air strikes and ground offensive. Entire families were shot at precisely as they were evacuating their buildings – upon orders from Israeli forces – carrying white flags.
Fears of a new military attack on Gaza are widespread among Palestinians, although Israel is unlikely to repeat a ground offensive which would be too risky to justify after Operation Cast Lead. Yet the new wave of rockets launched from Gaza and the immediate heavy air response – including strikes on Gaza City – were preceded by a training exercise by the Israeli military which was reportedly in preparation for a new assault on Gaza.
Israel says its Iron Dome missile defense system, meant to intercept Qassam, Grad and Katyusha rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, is ready to be installed. At the same time, Hamas itself says it wants to stop rockets from being fired into Israel, but resistance movements are still getting their way – especially the Palestinian Resistance Committees and the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Hamas is caught in a dilemma. It cannot afford another bloody assault on Gaza which would liquidate any popularity it might have at the moment, but at the same time it cannot alienate its grassroots by doing what it accuses the Palestinian Authority of doing – weeding out the resistance. The alienation of Hamas’s own grassroots is a real problem when some of the rank and file are believed to be defecting to hard-line salafist groups that condemn Hamas for not being truly Islamic.
Another front has been developing at a shocking pace over the last days – Egypt. Since the Egyptian government was caught building an iron wall in Rafah, aimed at stopping tunnel smuggling, events at the border have escalated and may be indicative of more trouble yet to come for Gaza.
Initial reactions and demonstrations launched by Hamas at the border were peaceful, but when international attention was arriving in the form of around 1,400 activists for the Gaza Freedom March, the Egyptian government would have none of it.
The demonstrators got the coverage they wanted, and Egypt felt embarrassed as, for once, it got centre stage as an accomplice in the occupation of Palestinians. In the end it allowed only 100 protestors to cross into Gaza for the freedom march meant to remember the one year anniversary since the Israeli assault, leaving Hamas to take over all the civil society demonstration within Gaza, but the damage to Egypt’s image was complete as it got accused of perpetuating the siege of Gaza.
As things were still all heated up, British MP George Galloway arrived with his Viva Palestina convoy in the Egyptian port town of El Arish. Events there unfolded dramatically, with police and activists clashing violently as Galloway was ordered to divert a good part of the convoy through Israel, which he refused.
“It is completely unconscionable that 25 per cent of our convoy should go to Israel and never arrive in Gaza. Because nothing that ever goes to Israel, ever arrives in Gaza,” the maverick British legislator said.
In the clashes, one Egyptian soldier was killed by a Palestinian in a cross-border shoot-out. Galloway was eventually allowed to enter Gaza for 48 hours with his convoy on Wednesday. He was deported from Egypt soon after he got out of Gaza on Friday morning and banned from ever returning.
Hamas is meanwhile further embarrassing Egypt in rejecting its reconciliation efforts with Fatah. Cairo must be losing its patience, and cutting down the smuggling route seems to be its first offensive on Gaza. Still, many Gazans believe Egypt is indeed generous with them and that Mubarak’s regime needs to take care of its own internal security.
“If they wanted to cut smuggling, they could blow up all the tunnels in one day,” is the common response to the question about Egypt’s intentions.
Meanwhile ordinary people in Gaza speak of a ‘double occupation’. Besides the Israeli one, they are now under Hamas, which just like Fatah in the West Bank, arrest their opponents, torture dissidents and ban political events held by Fatah, such as the anniversary of Fatah’s anniversary on 1 January.
As things stand, Hamas stands to lose a lot in the forthcoming scenarios. It lacks legitimacy, which it craves for, and its mandate in government will expire by the end of this month. At the same time, its security forces, Izz Ad Din Al Qassam Brigades and exiled political leadership stand to lose everything if they had to agree to a power-sharing agreement with Fatah.
With the Shalit deal put yet again on the backburner and the new round of rocket launches, all the border crossings with Israel have been closed, leaving the tunnels as the only umbilical cord feeding the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip. If that is cut off too, the unthinkable may happen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)