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Also this issue:
Blind Faith Been Had The Bork Shield Letters to the Editor |
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April 11-17, 2002
slant
The foundation for a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions is being laid right now in the Middle East.
As Israel wages a comprehensive war against the Palestinian people, it also is sabotaging the critical work of medical crews and humanitarian groups. Reports of blatantly illegal actions on the part of the Israel Defense Forces are streaming out of the West Bank: Movement of health personnel has been restricted; pharmacies and clinics have been shut down; ambulances have been destroyed; access to medical care for critically ill patients has been obstructed; and medical facilities have been forcibly entered and physicians and nurses have been held hostage away from their patients.
The International Committee of the Red Cross recently announced the cessation of all its operations in the West Bank due to ongoing and massive assaults against its hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical staff in all areas currently being targeted by the Israeli military campaign. In effect, this means that nearly 4 million people in the West Bank are not only being forced to live under 24-hour military curfew, without electricity or water or basic food provisions, but they are now also deprived of the most basic human right of all: the right to life-saving medical care.
In times of armed conflict, parties are expected to respect international humanitarian law, especially the principle of civilian immunity. This applies to Palestinians and Israelis alike. But since the start of the West Bank invasion, Israel has violated some of the most fundamental standards governing the conduct of hostilities, including failing to discriminate between military and civilian targets and barring access to medical treatment for the sick and wounded. As a result, the human toll has been devastating.
Sami Abdeh, a young man living on the West Bank near Manger Square in Bethlehem, watched his 64-year-old mother and 37-year-old brother die of wounds sustained from Israeli shelling to their apartment building one night. Since ambulances were prevented from moving about Bethlehem, Sami watched his mother and brother bleed to death on the floor of his bedroom, and the family was unable to take steps for a proper burial -- or even remove the bodies from the home -- for two days due to the curfew and continuous Israeli military presence in the neighborhood.
Halimeh Al-Atrash, a 42-year-old Palestinian Christian from a village just outside Bethlehem, had just gone into labor when her husband, Khaled, phoned for an ambulance. The Israeli army did not permit the ambulance to cross the checkpoint separating Bethlehem from the village. So, borrowing a private car, Khaled drove his wife to the military checkpoint separating the village from Bethlehem and asked for permission to get his wife to the ambulance waiting on the other side. Informing the soldiers of the emergency nature of the situation made no difference -- Khaled and Halimeh waited on one side of the checkpoint, while an ambulance and medical crew waited on the other side. After being in labor for more than an hour, in a car parked at a military roadblock, with medical help within sight but just out of reach, and surrounded by Israeli soldiers who did nothing to help, Halimeh gave birth to a baby that died minutes later.
Suraida Saleh, a 21-year-old native of Washington, D.C., was driving toward an Israeli military checkpoint in Ramallah on March 29, along with her husband and 9-month-old son, when Israeli soldiers opened fire on their vehicle. Suraida took 30 bullets to her body, which, according to her husband, she had used to protect him and their child. An ambulance was stalled on the other side of the same checkpoint for more than an hour before Suraida's husband and baby could be rescued and Suraida's body could be recovered from the bullet-riddled car. Her parents, also American citizens, requested an escort from the American Embassy so their daughter could be given a prompt burial, but they did not receive a response. Suraida's father, according to interviews he has given in the American press, said he waited until the curfew on Ramallah was temporarily lifted -- a full four days after Suraida's death -- until he was able to take her out of the hospital's overflowing morgue, carry her to the parking lot of the hospital, and lay her in the makeshift gravesite that Palestinian physicians had dug for 27 men, women and children who were the first victims of Israel's latest assaults.
These are just three of the tens of innocent lives lost in the past week during Israel's continuing invasion of the West Bank. But, as Amnesty International has stated, there is another victim in all this: the credibility of the system of international human rights and humanitarian law that the international community established in the aftermath of World War II.
An honest and unbiased effort is urgently needed from President Bush to put an end to the rhetorical formalities and to demand that Israel withdraw its troops from the entire West Bank, to restart a political negotiations process (not merely a shortsighted cease-fire) that will ensure freedom for the Palestinians and security for the Israelis, and -- most importantly -- to help pull the region away from the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe that seems all but inevitable.
Rania Awwad, a Palestinian-born American, worked as an emergency medical technician for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in the West Bank in Bethlehem and Nablus. If you would like to respond to these Slants or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., third floor, Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.
