They are required to obtain entry permits, to be at the bedside of their sick children, and arrive at the checkpoints without any personal effects to shorten the wait there. A day in the hospital with Palestinian parents from GazaI visited Tel Hashomer Hospital on Friday. As usual, most of the work was carried out in the intensive care unit, to which I brought cooked food and non-perishables (tea, coffee, sugar). The telephone cards were grabbed up, and even though I had brought a sufficient quantity, none were left for the other departments. All the adults in all the departments received food. I brought disposable diapers in two sizes - for newborn infants and for 2- year-olds."
This was the report that volunteer Nava Harnam made to her colleagues about her most recent visit to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer. For more than a year now, she has been part of a group of volunteers that has been regularly helping to care for Palestinian children from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank who are hospitalized there, and to assist the parents who are looking after them. Physicians for Human Rights has taken the entire project under its organizational - and material - wing.
"In October 2002, I got a phone call from Widah al-Khatib, a Palestinian resident of Beit Iba, a small village west of Nablus. He told me that the parents of a 2-week-old infant from his village, Shihab Ishtawi, who was born with a heart defect and was hospitalized at Tel Hashomer, were crying for help," relates the coordinator of the volunteer group, Bilha Golan, describing how it was conceived and how it works. "When I met them the next day they were very worried about the baby's condition, and because they had left three small children behind in the village. To my astonishment, I discovered that for several days they had not eaten properly, had not bathed and had not changed clothes. Later I found out that other parents of Palestinian children from Gaza and the West Bank who are also inpatients at the hospital live in the same conditions."
Golan decided to relate her experiences at the hospital to the public via the Internet communications network of the Actleft human rights organization, and called upon people to volunteer to help the families of the hospitalized children. In this way a group was organized, which works mostly in the intensive care, oncology, thoracic and cardiac surgery and rehabilitation units at Tel Hashomer. It is now comprised of about 12 people - women and men, Jews and Arabs.
One of them, T.G., a conscripted soldier, came to visit Shihab Ishtawi at the hospital every day. Often he enlisted buddies from his unit to his aid. "After a few days, the mother had to go home to take care of the rest of her children," says Golan. "The father, Ka'ed Ishtawi, remained at [the child's] side. From him we learned about the obstacles encountered by family members who care for a Palestinian child hospitalized in Israel. He praised the hospital, but complained of the difficulties he encounters on the way to it.
"Equipped with a hospitalization certificate from a hospital, a sick child's father, mother, grandfather or grandmother applies to the Israeli-Palestinian liaison committee and asks for an entry permit into Israel. After a few days they get the permit, but it is valid for only one day - from morning till evening. It can happen that the application is rejected `for security reasons.'"
According to Golan, a resident of Moshav Beit Shearim and a public health nurse in Zarzir in the north, the Ishtawis came to the hospital without any personal effects in order to make the passage through the checkpoints easier for themselves and to spare detailed searches of their things and the consequent delay. At the entrance to the hospital, the parents deposit their identity cards. As they usually have to stay there - with the staff's knowledge - for days or weeks, they avoid leaving the hospital complex so as not to risk arrest as illegal sojourners.
20 NIS in their pockets"At the hospital, close to where their dear ones are patients, the Palestinians are protected, but the moment they leave, they are vulnerable," says Golan. Thus, for example, Ka'ed Ishtawi was caught outside the hospital when he went to get some food for himself and was arrested by security personnel who took him to the Ramat Gan police. With the intervention of the volunteers, who explained his situation, he was released.
During the recent Ramadan month of fasting, Ishtawi went home, but then the baby's condition worsened and he was called back by the doctors. He was delayed at roadblocks, and only after Golan contacted the Civil Administration was he able to get to the hospital and be at his son's bedside.
In the end, however, despite all the doctors' efforts, his son died. "The fact that their baby died was unbearably difficult for his parents, but they know that the doctors and nurses at the hospital gave their baby the best medical care and did all they could to save him," says Al-Khatib.
On their way to Tel Hashomer, patients and their relatives who reside in Gaza pass through the Erez checkpoint; West Bank residents go through the Oranit roadblock. In either case, they are detained for anything from half an hour to two hours and often much longer. In an attempt to shorten the procedures there, most of them enter Israel without any personal effects, even though they will remain at the hospital for days or even weeks. Many of them, because of their economic distress, come into Israel with barely 20 NIS in their pockets. The volunteers try to provide them with what they need.
Harnam, a retired teacher who lives in Herzliya, relates that on her shift on Friday two weeks ago, she brought along cooked food, disposable diapers, bars of soap and telephone cards. Like others in the group, it is she who pays for these items out of her own pocket. Her husband drives her to the hospital.
Last Friday, one of the volunteers, Amal Shehadeh of Haifa, a master's student of translation at Bar-Ilan University, came along with her aunt with cooked food that her aunts had made, in her father's car. Sometimes neighbors also volunteer to prepare the food that is delivered, and add soap, sweets and toys for the sick children.
Last week the volunteer group took care of 18 children. The needs of the parents who are tending them are great.
Apart from the contributions provided by the members of the group, it also receives donations. In the explanatory page that is distributed to new volunteers, it says that the group members "do not give out money, cannot provide medications, treatment, entry permits into Israel, sojourning permits or payments to the hospital."
Two ambulances, one bodyYousra Dib, who lives in the Al-Zeitun neighborhood in Gaza, made arrangements by telephone to have an ambulance from Gaza bring her grandson - 3-month-old Abed al-Rahman Dib, who had died the previous day of cancer that had spread throughout his body - home from the hospital. She found out that under the new security regulations, the Red Crescent ambulance from Gaza would not be allowed to enter the hospital grounds. When the vehicle arrived at the hospital gate, therefore, another ambulance, from the hospital, transported her grandson's body to it. According to Dib, the doctors had treated her grandson devotedly and also told the family to bring his 4-year-old sister Nura to the hospital for examination.
"They found a hole in the heart of my 2- year-old daughter Ranya, who suffers from Down syndrome," explains Iman Irba'I of the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza. "She is the youngest of my eight children. My husband is unemployed. After great efforts, the Palestinian Authority agreed to pay for the surgery and for the girl's hospitalization in Israel. I'm worried, but I'm confident that the child is getting the best medical care.
"Golan and her colleagues stress that since the day it began, the group's volunteer activity has been carried out with the agreement and full cooperation of Tel Hashomer's management and the various units. As an example of the facility's openness, Golan cited the case of Muhammad Kot, 9, from the environs of Nablus, who suffered from pernicious anemia and urgently needed a bone marrow transplant. While the Palestinian Authority paid for the costs of the hospitalization and care - about NIS 95,000 - the hospital underwrote the cost of the transplant itself - over $50,000. The transplant was successful and Kot will receive follow-up care at the hospital.
"Through the bone marrow transplant, the child received life," says Dr. Amos Toren, head of the pediatric hemato-oncology and bone marrow transplant unit at Tel Hashomer. "In recent years we have performed 5 bone marrow transplants on Palestinian children from the territories. The medical team relates in the most natural way to this medical activity, and the hospital management gives it full backing."
Touching encountersIn the pediatric intensive care department, the parents of the Palestinian children have at their disposal a waiting room, a kitchenette and two small bedrooms, one for men and one for women, where there are bunk beds. Last Wednesday a Jewish man wearing a skullcap and his wife sat down to rest in this waiting room. The man made efforts to engage the Palestinians who were also sitting there in a conversation.
"Sometimes, we overcome the communications difficulties with the help of people who know both languages, Arabic and Hebrew, and sometimes we use English, and when there's no alternative, we use gestures like in a silent movie," explains one of the Palestinian mothers.
"The attitude and the atmosphere in the department are really contagious. Girls who are doing National Service help us willingly," relates volunteer Rina Moss. "The illnesses of their children bring Israeli parents close to the Palestinians. Thus, for example, not long ago a mother from central Israel was standing in despair near the door to the intensive care unit where her 10-year-old daughter was being treated for a brain hemorrhage. The father of a Palestinian child who noticed her distress brought her some hot tea that he made himself and started a conversation with her. The two of them sat there, relating their troubles to each other and comforting each other. It was a wonderful scene."
Moss also tells, however, of a certain group that distributes food only to the parents of sick Jewish and Israeli Arab children, but not to Palestinians from the territories. The Palestinians spare no praise and gratitude for the doctors, the nurses and the volunteers. They are wary when they speak about the difficulties at the roadblocks at the entrance to Israel and do not say anything specific about the conditions of their life in the territories. Indeed, to the direct question of whether they hate Israel and the Jews, a young Palestinian woman replies: "We hate, but not everybody, not the ones who treat us like human beings, for example, here at the hospital, but those who make us suffer."
Says volunteer Shehadeh: "The people who come to the hospital and witness the medical care that their dear ones are given suffer from an inner conflict because of the gap between the reality in which they live in the territories, and the reality that they encounter here at the hospital."
"The reality in the territories," adds Golan, "is familiar to me from the weekly volunteer medical project in which I have participated. The occupation creates a destructive reality, whereas here at the hospital, there is an island of sanity."
