Gaza blockade threatens health of 1.4 million, aid agencies warn
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- Written by James Sturcke James Sturcke
- Published: 20 January 2010 20 January 2010
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Israeli and Egyptian blockade means nearly one-fifth of requests to leave for treatment are refused or delayed, report says
An Israeli soldier relaxes at the Karni crossing with the Gaza Strip
A Gaza crossing point: A new report warns that the blockade is risking the health of 1.4 million people. Photograph: Ariel Schalit/AP
The health of 1.4 million people is being put at risk by the ongoing Israeli and Egyptian blockade of Gaza, a report by more than 80 humanitarian organisations warned today.
The aid groups, including the World Health Organisation and UN agencies, said more than one-fifth of sick Palestinians who needed to leave the territory for treatment in Israel had either been refused or had their applications delayed. The groups called on Israel and Egypt to open the border crossings with Gaza.
Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinian territories, said the blockade undermined the local healthcare system and put lives at risk.
"It is causing ongoing deterioration in the social, economic and environmental determinants of health," he said.
"It is hampering the provision of medical supplies and the training of health staff, and it is preventing patients with serious medical conditions from getting timely specialised treatment."
The agencies highlighted the case of a student, Fidaa Hijji, who died of cancer while waiting for Israeli permission to go to hospital for a bone marrow operation.
Repeated applications to cross the border were ignored even though Hijji, who was 18 when her cancer was diagnosed in 2007, had confirmed medical appointments.
Permission for her entry to Israel was finally given a day after she died last month.
Israel generally permits supplies of drugs into Gaza, but not always of enough to prevent shortages. Certain medical equipment, such as x-ray and electronic devices, is difficult to bring in and clinical staff frequently lack equipment they need, the UN said.
The blockade was imposed after Hamas militants seized control of Gaza in 2007.
Health professionals in Gaza have been cut off from the outside world, with few doctors, nurses or technicians able to leave for the training necessary to update their clinical skills or learn about new medical technology during the past decade, the agencies said.
Many specialised treatments, such as heart surgery and some cancer treatments, are unavailable in Gaza.
"An effective healthcare system cannot be sustained in isolation from the international community," Tony Laurance, the WHO head in the West Bank and Gaza, said.
"Open borders are needed to ensure the health of the 1.4 million people in Gaza."
WHO figures indicate that 21% of the 1,103 applications last month to travel to Israel for hospital appointments were denied or delayed.
Twenty-nine patients died last year awaiting referral, down from 46 in 2008.
An Israeli spokesman said approvals had increased by 25% since 2008.
"Not only are we doing our utmost to allow the people of Gaza every possible medical treatment, but we are doing this in a situation in which their own government is imposing a state of war and trying deliberately to harm Israelis, including those whose mission is to assist the very people of Gaza," Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, said.
Israel accused of silencing political protest
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- Written by BEN HUBBARD, The Associated Press BEN HUBBARD, The Associated Press
- Published: 19 January 2010 19 January 2010
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In the most high-profile case yet, Jerusalem police detained the leader of a leading Israeli human rights group during a vigil against the eviction of Palestinian families whose homes were taken by Jewish settlers.
Since the summer, dozens of Palestinian and Israeli activists have been picked up, including those organizing weekly protests against Israel's West Bank separation barrier as well as others advocating international boycotts of Israeli goods.
Some of the Palestinians were released without charge only after weeks and months of questioning.
The arrests come at a time of shifting tactics in the protests against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and annexation of east Jerusalem, territories the Palestinians want for their future state. Israel captured both from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war.
The violence of the second Palestinian uprising, with mass marches and violent attacks, has given way to carefully calibrated protests and legal action in which Israeli and Palestinian activists now often work together.
The main protest efforts are Friday demonstrations against the West Bank barrier in the Palestinian villages of Bilin and Naalin and vigils in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheik Jarrah, where Palestinians have been evicted.
There appears to be an increased police crackdown on the protests with greater numbers of activists being arrested.
In the West Bank, troops fire tear gas, stun grenades, and live rounds - even midnight arrest raids - to disperse anti-barrier protesters. Israel says the protests are illegal, and the harsh tactics are a response to stone-throwing and violent rioting.
In east Jerusalem, police have arrested some 70 demonstrators during marches in recent months, according to Israeli rights groups. At Friday's protest, police arrested 17 Israelis, including Hagai Elad, head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
They were released 36 hours later by a Jerusalem court, which found the gathering to be illegal, but the arrests unnecessary.
Elad said the arrests represent a "dramatic increase in attempts to silence dissent" that he believes began during last year's offensive in Gaza, when Israel arrested hundreds of anti-war protesters, mostly Arab citizens of Israel.
Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld dismissed allegations of an arrest campaign and said recent protests in east Jerusalem did not have the required permits.
"There's no campaign whatsoever," he said. "When there's a right wing or left wing, or Jewish or non-Jewish or Christian or Muslim demonstration ... they have to be fully coordinated with the police."
The residents of Bilin have marched every Friday since 2005 toward the barrier that separates villagers from 60 percent of their land. Last year, Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu dropped by for a visit. Nearby Naalin started similar marches two years ago.
Israel says the barrier seeks to keep out Palestinian attackers, including suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a land grab because parts of it jut far into the West Bank.
The Bilin marchers, joined by Israeli sympathizers and international activists, chant and wave Palestinian flags. Some youths throw stones at Israeli soldiers. A Bilin man and five in Naalin have been killed and hundreds wounded over the years by soldiers. Israeli troops also have been injured, including one who lost an eye.
Since June, Israel has arrested almost three dozen villagers, mostly during night raids on the village, organizers say. More than 100 have been arrested in Naalin, including 16 in the past month.
Schoolteacher Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, a leader of the Bilin protests, has been held since last month on charges of incitement and weapons possession - the latter stemming from spent Israeli tear gas canisters, stun grenades and other munitions he collected to show visitors.
Two high-profile Palestinian activists were recently released without being charged.
Jamal Juma, coordinator of the Stop The Wall campaign, was held for 17 days. Mohammed Othman, who encourages a boycott against Israel, was released after nearly four months.
Othman, who was arrested upon his return from an advocacy trip to Norway, said he was interrogated almost daily. "The questions focused on the boycott movement, 'How do you work on this and who are your contacts?'" said Othman, 33.
Interrogators searched his computer, his cell phone and e-mail accounts, he said. He had to pay a $2,700 bond.
Othman said he would continue with his activism. "I don't do anything illegal," he said. "All my work was out in the open."
Robert Fisk’s World: The stakes get higher as Arab princes try to outdo each other
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- Written by Robert Fisk Robert Fisk
- Published: 19 January 2010 19 January 2010
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Do the Saudis not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is quite a man.
He says he doesn't want to be the prime minister of Lebanon – everyone who wants to be the prime minister of Lebanon says that – but he is immensely wealthy. True, his bank balance has sunk from $23.7bn to a mere $13.3bn since 2005 (thus sayeth Forbes magazine). But he's just announced that he wants to construct the world's tallest building – a 1km-high goliath which will dwarf his neighbour emir in Dubai who last month opened the paltry 25,000ft Burj Khalifa amid the sand dunes of his bankrupt creditors. The nephew of King Abdullah, al-Waleed understandably calls his company Kingdom Holdings. He also happens to be a major shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp – which is why you won't be reading these words in The Times. Long live Kingdom Holdings, I suppose.
Because yesterday morning, I was taking an al-Jazeera television crew around the repulsive, obscene, outrageous, filthy, stinking slums of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps not far from my home in Beirut, a place of such squalor that the gorge rises that human beings even live there. Sabra and Chatila – yes, the site of that infamous massacre in 1982 when Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians while the Israeli army surrounded the camps, watched the killings – and did nothing. They were the survivors of the great exodus or ethnic cleansing of 1948 – or their sons or grandsons – who fled Galilee for the "temporary" safety of Lebanon and, like the visa applicants of the movie Casablanca, wait and wait – and wait – to go home. Which they will never do. "I am very positive," Prince al-Waleed said when he announced his new priapic tower, to be constructed in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. "We are always looking for new investments."
Now I know that there are a lot of fine philanthropists in the Gulf, Prince al-Waleed among them, but what is one to make of all this? Afghanistan is collapsing in blood; Iraq remains a state of semi-civil war; the Israelis continue to thieve land for Jews and Jews only from the Arabs who hold the title deeds to that property – and Prince al-Waled wants to build a tower reaching a kilometre into the sky. Do the Saudis – who gave so much largesse to the Taliban (we have to forget this, of course, along with the fact that the Saudis provided most of the murderers of 9/11, which is why we bombed Kabul rather than Riyadh) – not have the slightest idea of what is going on around them?
For example, we all know that the Americans maintain stocks of weapons among their allies. They keep munitions in South Korea and, indeed, in the Arab Gulf (aka Saudi Arabia). But very quietly this week, they agreed to double their munitions supplies in Israel from $400m of weapons to $800m. Of course, Washington's gift of $9bn to Israel up to 2012 – never, of course, to be spent on those illegal colonies which are built against international law on Arab land but which Barack Obama now pusillanimously ignores – has nothing to do with this. But don't imagine that – in the event of a new "preventive" war – Israel cannot draw on these supplies for its own army and air force. After all, it was a missile taken to Saudi Arabia by the US marines for use against Iraq in 1991 that ended up in the hands of the Israeli air force as part of a quid pro quo for not joining in the war against Baghad - and which was subsequently used to kill civilians in a Lebanese ambulance in 1996.
But these days, Arab compliance reaches new heights every day. Now, for example, we have the Egyptian government – and its ever popular president (see the American-approved presidential election results which are way above 90 per cent) – building a wall around Rafah, part of the vast mass of poverty which constitutes Gaza, thus preventing food, gasoline (and, no doubt, weapons) from reaching the trapped Palestinians of this prison camp. A camp, one has to add, which meets with the full approval of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, whose honourable involvement in the invasion of Iraq has now been outdone by is extraordinary success as peace envoy to the Middle East.
Egypt's intelligence boss (a certain Mr Sulieman who might be the next president of Egypt were it not for his pattern of heart attacks) approves of this wall, which is a very definite assistance to Israel and which will yet further impoverish the Palestinians of Gaza to the point at which the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila might actually feel themselves lucky they don't live in "Palestine".
In Israel itself, the deputy foreign minister humiliates the Turkish ambassador – while complaining about an anti-Semitic series on Turkish television – by forcing the diplomat to sit on a low sofa, refusing to shake hands and addressing him, with two colleagues, from higher chairs. The foreign minister himself, our dear friend Mr Lieberman, has now acquired the habit – every time poor old (and I mean old) US envoy George Mitchell raises the question of Jerusalem – of walking out of the room. That's what Obama's point man is worth. Israel's crazies – Netanyahu is a moderate chap by comparison – now prove that Israel can be just as much a banana Raj as the rest of the Middle East.
But fear not. The princes and the emirs and the caliphs and the presidents will be able to outbid each other in towers and hotels. I have a bigger painting set than yours. I have a sharper pencil, more crayons, a larger train set (Qatar, please note), a bigger bear than yours. And the world will watch this tragedy and marvel at the toy boxes now being opened in the Middle East. And, by the way, how many crayons do the children of Sabra and Chatila have?
Diskin to Abbas: Defer UN vote on Goldstone or face 'second Gaza'
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- Written by Akiva Eldar Akiva Eldar
- Published: 18 January 2010 18 January 2010
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The request by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations Human Rights Council last year to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report followed a particularly tense meeting with the head of the Shin Bet security service, Haaretz has learned. At the October meeting in Ramallah, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year's military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a "second Gaza."
Diskin, who reports directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier last year. He also said Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the Palestinian Authority. That would have cost the PA tens of millions of dollars in compensation payments to the company.
A PA official close to Abbas told Haaretz that Diskin came to the Muqata compound in Ramallah in October with a foreign diplomatic delegation, and that a senior Israel Defense Forces officer made similar threats to other PA leaders at around the same time.
The Shin Bet said in response that it does not comment on Diskin's schedule or meetings.
Abbas told a Palestinian commission of inquiry investigating the vote's deferral that he accepted responsibility for the decision, and denied that his choice was a result of outside pressure.
Commission chairman and PA legislator Azmi Shuaibi told Al-Watan TV at the time that in a three-hour session Abbas admitted to the panel that he had made a mistake in asking the UN body to defer the vote and said he was sorry that the affair had been exploited for political ends.
Thirty-three of the UN council's 47 members supported the PA's initial endorsement of the Goldstone report. The matter was slated to be transferred from the UN General Assembly to the Security Council, when to the surprise of diplomats on all sides the PA delegation agreed at the last moment to defer the vote until March 2010.
The Goldstone commission recommended that Israel be given until March to complete an independent inquiry into its conduct during the offensive and to try any figures suspected of war crimes. Failure by either Israel or Hamas to conduct an open inquiry into their conduct would result in the case being referred to the International Criminal Court.
The United States is now seeking to persuade Israel to conduct such an investigation, and to release its findings on a number of incidents in which civilians were killed during the fighting.
Israel's compassion in Haiti can't hide our ugly face in Gaza
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- Written by Akiva Eldar Akiva Eldar
- Published: 18 January 2010 18 January 2010
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Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman's Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.
Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel's good side.
But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour's drive from the offices of Israel's major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?
The Israeli newspaper reader knows about the baby pulled from the wreckage in Port-au-Prince. Few have heard about the infants who sleep in the ruins of their families' homes in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prohibition of reporters entering the Gaza Strip is an excellent excuse for burying our heads in the sand of Tel Aviv's beaches; on a good day, the sobering reports compiled by human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel on the situation in Gaza are pushed to the newspapers' back pages. To get an idea of what life is like in the world's largest prison, one must forgo "Big Brother" and switch to one of the foreign networks.
The disaster in Haiti is a natural one; the one in Gaza is the unproud handiwork of man. Our handiwork. The IDF does not send cargo planes stuffed with medicines and medical equipment to Gaza. The missiles that Israel Air Force combat aircraft fired there a year ago hit nearly 60,000 homes and factories, turning 3,500 of them into rubble. Since then, 10,000 people have been living without running water, 40,000 without electricity. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza's factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry. Soon it will be one year since the international community pledged, at the emergency conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to donate $4.5 billion for Gaza's reconstruction. Israel's ban on bringing in building materials is causing that money to lose its value.
A few days before Israeli physicians rushed to save the lives of injured Haitians, the authorities at the Erez checkpoint prevented 17 people from passing through in order to get to a Ramallah hospital for urgent corneal transplant surgery. Perhaps they voted for Hamas. At the same time that Israeli psychologists are treating Haiti's orphans with devotion, Israeli inspectors are making sure no one is attempting to plant a doll, a notebook or a bar of chocolate in a container bringing essential goods into Gaza. So what if the Goldstone Commission demanded that Israel lift the blockade on the Strip and end the collective punishment of its inhabitants? Only those who hate Israel could use frontier justice against the first country to set up a field hospital in Haiti.
True, Haiti's militias are not firing rockets at Israel. But the siege on Gaza has not stopped the Qassams from coming. The prohibition of cilantro, vinegar and ginger being brought into the Strip since June 2007 was intended to expedite the release of Gilad Shalit and facilitate the fall of the Hamas regime. As everyone knows, even though neither mission has been particularly successful, and despite international criticism, Israel continues to keep the gates of Gaza locked. Even the images of our excellent doctors in Haiti cannot blur our ugly face in the Strip.