Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) is reporting that a two-year-old girl diagnosed with lukemia died in Gaza on Saturday 16 October, ten days after a “referral” for emergency treatment in Israel.
A “referral” means that the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah [in a state of bitter rivalry with the Hamas rulers of Gaza who routed Palestinian/Fatah Preventive Security forces in June 2007] has gone through the steps approved a request from Gaza for medical treatment in Israel, and has provided bank guarantees.
This is the agreed procedure.
The Israeli Military specified this procedure, in conjunction with the PA in Ramallah.
Then, PHR-Israel reports, “requests to the Israeli Army for an entry permit went unanswered for several days”.
A PHR-Israel press release, issued today, does not explicitly state the date on which the request for an entry permit was first made. But, it is clear that “several days” went by, without any reply.
In any case, PHR-Israel says that as soon as the family of Nasma Abu Lasheen were contacted them for help, they intervened — turning to the Israeli Army’s Gaza District Coordination Office (DCO) and demanding that “a permit be issued immediately to the baby and her father to enable their entry into Israel. A military approval was finally granted the next afternoon, on October 14, 2010”.
However, by the time the permit was received, PHR-Israel reports, the treating doctor in Gaza, Dr. Mohammad Abu Sha’aban, said Nasma was too sick to travel, and she died in Gaza during the early morning hours of October 16th.
A few months after the Hamas June 2007 “military coup” in Gaza [and the subsequent political coup in Ramallah, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved a short-lived “National Unity” Government and replaced it with a Hamas-free structure] the Israeli government declared that Gaza was an “enemy entity”, or “hostile territory”, and authorized the Israel military to implement this decision. In October 2007, Israeli military-administered sanctions went into effect against Gaza.
In response to a petition against these sanctions by a group of Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups [including PHR-Israel — the effort was led by GISHA] Israel’s Supreme Court ruled at the end of January 2008 that, despite a long history of Gaza’s dependence on Israel, the military-administered sanctions were permissible, as long as the military did not allow a “humanitarian crisis” to develop.