UN-Truth

The Israeli government opened a small “emergency medical treatment center” on Sunday in the main building of the Erez crossing between Israel and Gaza. A doctor working in the “field hospital” said that three patients had arrived from Gaza on Sunday. [UPDATE: There have also since reportedly been seven children who passed through the treatment center -- most of them cancer patients wanting to resume their treatment in Israeli or Palestinian hospitals outside the Gaza Strip.]

Many people may not have known about the new “field hospital”, one of the medical personnel at the clinic said, and more are expected in the coming days.

Haaretz reported here that “Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog, who attended the clinic opening in the Erez crossing pedestrian zone, said the clinic would treat as many people as possible”.

The maximum capacity is 100 to 150 people a day.

It is actually set up more like a neighborhood clinic than a “field hospital” in the war zone that Gaza has become. The clinic does not appear to be prepared to mount a massive rescue operation of critically wounded patients. It will take a minimum of two to three hours — a minimum — to process a patient through, once they arrive at the clinic, which is set up in converted office space on the ground floor of the Erez terminal building. There is even a play area for small children.

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post has written that “the clinic is a humanitarian gesture by Israel following the 22-day operation in Gaza”.

Patients would have to be pretty mobile just to get there, and they have to go through an Israeli security check — after passing through a Palestinian security control — before entering the terminal. There does not seem to be an operating room, although there is an emergency resuscitation room with life support machines which were used for one Gazan who had managed to walk in before having a heart attack in the terminal. Another woman was allowed to pass through to Israel to resume her cancer treatment at a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem. And a third patient was treated for sinusitis, before choosing to return to Gaza.

Access to the Erez terminal is now strictly controlled by the military at a point about a mile away on the Israeli side. From the Gazan side, it is a nearly two-kilometer walk on earth that is un-even because it is regularly dug up by IDF tank forays. It can be creepily empty at times, and it is occasionally shot at by both sides. Back-to-back ambulance transfers would be difficult, if they are even possible under the current security regulations.

Arriving at the large grey concrete terminal, two very large white banners are clearly visible, hanging over the line of glass doors. These banners, in three languages, prominently proclaim that here is the “The State of Israel REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER FOR THE PEOPLE OF GAZA” …

Meanwhile, international NGOs are complaining about their lack of access to Gaza (which now reportedly looks rather like downtown Grozny did after two Russian offensives), more than a day after the cease-fire went into effect. Cassandra Nelson of The Mercy Corps said “It’s a disgrace. There’s no transparency, no process — not even any single point person to contact. We’ve had to call all over, and we don’t know what is happening, or when we can get in”…

The “field hospital” is actually inside the Erez terminal, in converted office space on the ground floor to the right of the main entrance. It is being run by Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA), the Israeli Red Star-of-David (instead of Cross) Society.

Dr. Eilat Schnar, a professor of medicine and director of the Magen David Adom blood services, explains that there are about 30 staff on duty, of whom 8 are doctors. The center will be open office hours only – 8 am to 5 pm. “No one will stay here at night”, Dr. Schnar said.

“It’s a clinic”, she explained, to have people come here, get diagnosed and first treatment, then be sent to other hospitals either in Gaza or in Israel, or to be sent home”. The hospitals in Gaza are all stretched beyond their capacity — but “some people do not want to come to Israel”, she noted.

Asked how many places would be available in Israeli hospitals for Gazan patients who come to Erez, Dr. Schnar said that “the Ministry of Health has told us that, if needed, patients from Gaza will get treatment” in Israeli medical institutions.

This Israeli MDA medical treatement center at the Erez crossing will apparently have the power, on its own, to refer Palestinian patients from Gaza to Israeli hospitals — which would remove much of the difficult bureaucracy that has been in place previously.

The International Committee of the Red Cross is coordinating from the Gazan side, as is Medecins sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders), Dr. Schnar said. “And we have been told by people in the terminal that we should expect people to just walk in by themselves”. Of course, they will have to go through the usual security screening first … and it appears they will have to be able to work.

She also said that “Magen David Adom is an independent national society that is in charge of all emergency medical services in Israel … We were asked (just) two days ago by the Ministry of Health to set up this clinic. The government believes that MDA should do this”.

And, she indicated that the medical staff at the treatment center were imbued with a sense of mission. They were not afraid to come to Erez, she said, because “most of us have lived in border communities nearby for the past eight years. She added, with feeling, that “We are very happy we got this task. We all feel it is very, very important to get medical treatment for the people in Gaza”.

Israeli human rights organizations have petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to order the military to make provisions to evacuate the wounded. A decision is expected in the next day or so. Until now, Israel’s Defense Ministry — which has administered a regime of tightening sanctions against the Gaza Strip for over a year — has argued that it’s too dangerous to arrange for evacuation. But the human rights groups claim that “it doesn’t matter”. They say that it must be done in times of war — and they note that a state of war makes the duties of the occupier even more binding.

At least one of the human rights organizations has said that this little “field hospital” is really “too little, too late”. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR) commented, in an information note, that this “Clinic opened 21 days too late!”

Miri Weingarten of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel told Haaretz that “the Israeli army has repeatedly refused her group’s requests to evacuate wounded Gazans during the war, and called the border clinic too little, too late. ‘We think that it demonstrates a cynical use of medical care for propaganda, meaning that when Israel wants to correct its public image, it can and will evacuate the wounded’, Weingarten said”. This can be read in full here.

The Jerusalem Post had more: “Physicians for Human Rights claimed that Israel had provided various reasons for its refusal [to allow evacuation of the wounded] , such as conditioning evacuation on written financial commitments by the Palestinian Health Ministry or insisting that evacuation was not possible without the agreement of Hamas. The group said it hoped ‘the sick and wounded will indeed be permitted to leave Gaza into medical centers in Israel or any other country, and not only for purposes of propaganda. After three weeks during which we called for the evacuation of the sick and wounded and received negative responses, it is long past time for the government of Israel to do so’, it said. But according to [Minister Isaac] Herzog, Palestinian patients were offered medical care in Israel throughout Operation Cast Lead, but Hamas pressured them to turn down the offer. Therefore, very few sought treatment in Israel. Now that the fighting appears to be winding down, ‘it is much easier and quicker to bring people for treatment here’, he said. Levy said that in the past three weeks, some 45 Palestinians were allowed to exit Gaza through Erez for medical treatment. The Israel Medical Association has called on physicians to volunteer to work at the new clinic”… This report is published here.

The full PHR complaint says that “When Israel needs to correct its image, it can quickly evacuate wounded. The decision to allow evacuation of wounded to Israel disproves the claim that the State toted until today. For three weeks Israel refused PHR’s request to evacuate wounded people to Israel.
Today, after 21 days of fighting, Israel decided to begin assisting in the provision of medical care to Palestinian wounded people. The Israeli Ministry of Health announced that it would admit wounded people from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals, and that today a field hospital would be opened on the Israeli side of the border at Erez Crossing, for purposes of initial care and triage. The decision of Israel to enable the evacuation of the wounded into Israel undermines its previous claims regarding the impossibility of such evacuation. It demonstrates the cynical use made by the Government of Israel of the evacuation of the wounded for purposes of propaganda. When Israel needs to correct its public image, it can and does evacuate the wounded in time. This exploitation of medical care contradicts the regulations of the World Medical Association for times of armed conflict (Par. 14): ‘Hospitals and health care facilities situated in war regions must be respected by combatants and media personnel. Health care given to the sick and wounded, civilians or combatants, cannot be used for morbid publicity or propaganda. The privacy of the sick, wounded and dead must always be respected’.
Only after the home of Dr. Abu AlEish in Gaza was shelled by an Israeli tank, killing six of his family members and injuring at least four others and a telephone conversation between Abu AlEish and Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar of Channel 10 News was broadcast on air immediately after the attack, did the Government of Israel authorize evacuation of some of the injured family members to Israeli hospitals by Israeli ambulances and helicopters. Israeli ambulances entered Gaza and took them out into Israeli territory. This fact was widely publicized in Israeli media. This decision was made despite a previous refusal by Israel to respond to PHR-Israel’s repeated requests to enable evacuation of wounded people into Israel over the past three weeks. Various reasons were provided for this refusal, such as conditioning evacuation upon written financial commitments by the Palestinian Ministry of Health or insisting that evacuation was not possible without the agreement of Hamas. Physicians for Human Rights-Israel hopes that the sick and wounded will indeed be permitted to leave Gaza into medical centers in Israel or any other country, and not only for purposes of propaganda. After three weeks during which we called for the evacuation of the sick and wounded and received negative responses, it is long past time for the government of Israel to do so”.

Too little, too late, yes. But in any case, this Israeli effort — apparently spurred by the head of the Israeli Medical Association, as we earlier reported here — would not have helped much in the case of Amira, revealed after the cease-fire.

Her case is just one of what must be tens of thousands of tragic stories (if not more) that will emerge from these three weeks of Israeli attacks on Gaza.

YNet reported that “Her relatives thought they had buried her, but Amira Kurim was found wounded and shell-shocked on Saturday in an abandoned Gaza City apartment … Often, members of the same family died together, huddling for safety and comfort during bombing runs. Relatives of 14-year-old Amira were convinced she had died in the same round of shelling that killed her father, sister and brother last Wednesday. They were all fleeing fighting in the Gaza City suburb of Tel Hawwa when her father was struck down by an Israeli missile. Kurim’s 11-year-old brother Alaa and 12-year-old sister Ismat rushed to find an ambulance while Amira stayed with her father. Suddenly, another shell exploded. “I stayed with daddy and they banged another rocket (nearby) and I was wounded,” Amira told The Associated Press from her bed in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, her face pale with shock, her lips quivering She limped to a nearby apartment building with a bleeding, broken leg. And there she lay for four days, until Emad Eid, a journalist for a TV channel run by the radical Lebanese Hizbullah went to survey damage to the apartment he’d fled on the first day of the Israeli assault. Beneath shattered windows, Eid found Amira lying on a mattress soaked with blood, her pants tried around her leg in an effort to halt the bleeding.
‘She didn’t know where she was’, Eid said. ‘She just moaned’. While Amira survived, her brother and sister did not. They were killed by a shell as they looked for help for their father. Medics found their bodies, along with their father’s on Friday. Relatives believed that body parts found nearby were those of Amira. Amira was reunited Saturday with her mother from whom she’d been separated for years by her parents’ divorce”. This was first reported in YNet here.

Ma’an News Agency, for whom Eid works, added his testimony to the narrative yesterday: “For two days 15-year-old Amira’s wound bled without medical treatment. She fled her home, and the dead bodies of her father and two brothers, to an abandoned apartment. She only had a bucket of water, no blankets or first aid equipment for two days as she hid in the building. It was the home of Ma’an journalist Emad Eid that she found. Emad had moved his family to a different, safer area of Gaza City. He returned to his home when Israeli tanks retreated from Tel Al-Hawa, to see what damage was done.
He found Amira bleeding in his empty home where he had left no food, water or bedding. Below is a translation of Emad’s record of Amira’s ordeal [n.b. - it's clear he's not a writer, but probably a cameraman]: ‘Excuse me – I have no clue from where to start this story, so I will ask Amira: How did you protect yourself from the bombs? How did you handle the sounds of the tanks when you were by yourself, bleeding, hiding alone for two days? I am afraid she will not be able to answer me though. I am afraid she has neither the strength nor the courage, though she had the courage to stay alive. Maybe I can ask her if she remembers what happened to kill her family, or if she was too shocked or unconscious. She did, after all, only have five units of blood left when medics saw her … The medics told me what it means for a small girl to have only five units of blood left. They told me that she was between living and dead. I want to ask Amira where she got her strength to live … ‘Forgive me, I entered your house without your permission’, she said to me when I found her in on my mother’s bed. She was covered in blood and there were tear-stains on her cheeks … [W]hen I found her she was sleeping, or rather hovering between life and death, as the medics said. She must have heard the clashes between the resistance fighters and the Israeli army troops. ‘I don’t know how I entered to your house Uncle’, she said to me, a stranger, when I woke her. ‘They killed my father and brothers in front of my eyes, they shot a bomb at me and my leg was injured. I ran away from that place, but they shot another bomb that missed me, I found the door of your house open so I came in and stayed on the bed alone, listening to what was going on. I couldn’t scream or cry from my bleeding wounds because they would have heard me’ … Her family thought she was killed with her father, Fathi Dawoud Alkaram, 42, and brothers Esmat, 12, and Ala, 11, who died when a bomb hit their home. They buried pieces of what they thought was Amira. The day before we rushed Amira to Ash-Shifa Hospital, her mother buried Fathi, Esmat and Ala. She thought Amira was still beneath the rubble. When she got word, Amira’s mother rushed to the hospital. She cried a great deal. Amira’s uncles praised god and thanked him for the miracle of her life”. This account was published by Ma’an News Agency here.

There may be hundreds, or thousands, of wounded like Amira who lay, undiscovered and alone, in an agony of pain and terror, in the cold, and amidst the fighting …

Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Gaza, Human Rights, Humanitarian Aid, International Humanitarian Law, Iran, Israel, Japan, Journalism and Journalists, Palestine & Palestinians, Quartet, UN Secretary-General, UN Security Council, US in UN, United Nations Agencies and Programmes