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Thursday, November 28, 2019
Gaza children forced to have medical treatment alone
A child receives medical treatment in al-Rantisi children’s hospital in
Gaza City in January 2019. There are hundreds of cases of Palestinian
children traveling to Israel and the West Bank without a parent for
medical treatment unavailable in Gaza each month.
APA images
Children being made to endure lengthy medical treatments alone is a
particularly cruel feature of Israel’s permit regime imposed on
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
It is a shameful reality that COGAT, the Israeli military body that handles such permits, tries to obscure with liberal use of emojis on its social media pages.
I have previously written about
how COGAT tries to present itself as a humanitarian body in its social
media propaganda while it plays a central role in Israel’s complete and
unjust system of control over Palestinian movement.
For example, COGAT describes its
restrictions on the movement of millions of Palestinians, such as
military checkpoints, as projects which “improve the quality of life of
the region’s population.”
It even put out a video last
week boasting of a “service revolution” following the launch of “an
advanced call center” through which its Civil Administration “provides
clear responses on all topics, to everyone”:
A new call center has launched that provides a human response to public inquiries about all areas of service within the Civil Administration. The hotline is active Sunday-Thursday from 8:00AM-5:00PM & provides service in English, Hebrew, & Arabic. The phone number is 074-7642929.
Meet Alyse, a COGAT soldier, originally from Chicago, working in the Hebron Civil Coordination Administration. She deals with entry visas for the residents of the city of Hebron and its surrounding villages and tells about her experiences in this behind-the-scenes video.
“Profoundly devastating”
According to a new report,
Israel approved fewer than half of the applications submitted by
parents seeking permission to travel with their children referred for
medical treatment outside Gaza between February and September last year.
COGAT told Physicians for Human Rights Israel,
which authored the report, that the number of approved permits has
improved since then. But the rights group says there are still “hundreds
of cases of children traveling for medical treatment without at least
one parent every month.”
Children traveling with a distant relative or even a stranger to medical
facilities in Israel and the West Bank “is a manifestation of the
profoundly devastating implications of the permit regime for Palestinian
society in general, and in the Gaza Strip in particular,” the group
states.
Palestinians in Gaza cannot freely travel to Israel or the West Bank. To
do so, they must submit an application through Palestinian Authority
interlocutors for an Israeli permit.
Parents wishing to accompany their child for medical treatment
unavailable in Gaza, which has been under Israeli blockade for more than
12 years, must undergo a security check which may take months.
As a result, “children’s access to treatment or surgery is sometimes
delayed for many months, or eventually even completely denied,”
according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel.
A child may be separated from their parents during treatment, as was the
case of a 3-year-old boy who spent 43 days without his mom or dad as he
underwent chemotherapy in a West Bank hospital earlier this year.
It is a traumatizing experience for children forced to undergo medical
treatment without one of their parents. Children hospitalized with a
parent accompanying them “react faster to treatment and have stronger
vital signs,” Physicians for Human Rights Israel reports, summarizing
the findings of the head nurse of a Jerusalem hospital’s pediatric
intensive care unit.
The report adds that sudden separation of nursing babies from their
mothers has “serious psychological implications and prolongs treatment.”
Subcontractor carrying out Israeli policy
Parents in Gaza are meanwhile discouraged by the Palestinian Civil
Affairs Committee from submitting applications to accompany their
children since they are unlikely to be approved. The committee
recommends that permits be sought for grandparents instead.
“This effectively blocks any possibility for the parents to accompany
their children,” Physicians for Human Rights Israel states. “Instead of
fighting Israeli policy,” the committee acts as “a subcontractor that
carries out their policy.”
Israeli medical institutions meanwhile defer to so-called security needs over the wellbeing of patients.
“The readiness displayed by medical staff to adjust and lower their
demands when dealing with the security establishment effectively leads
to completely different treatment standards being applied according to
population type,” the group states.
The result is “a policy that systematically and continuously violates
the right to health of children from the Gaza Strip and their chances of
recovery.”
It’s an appalling reality endured by a great number of families in Gaza –
more than 5,000 permits have been issued to children needing medical
treatment so far in 2019.
There’s nothing humanitarian about COGAT and the cruel military occupation which it facilitates.
