Two eminent Israeli doctors have called on their government to take immediate action to prevent the collapse of health services in Gaza and the West Bank in the wake of the international and Israeli boycott of the Hamas led Palestinian Authority.
Rafi Walden, head of surgery and assistant director at Sheba Hospital, and Zvi Bentwich, an epidemiologist who founded Israel's first AIDS clinic, warned that Palestinian health services were facing a full scale “emergency” because of the funding cuts by Israel and donor countries.
Both professors are board members of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, which produced a report last week warning that the occupied territories face a “humanitarian disaster” because of critical shortages of drugs, unpaid salaries for clinical staff, and the Palestinian Authority's inability to pay for cancer patients and other seriously ill patients to be transferred to Israeli hospitals.
The report details the cancellation of all elective surgery at Gaza's main Shifa Hospital, along with an “acute shortage” of anaesthetics and the fact that seven new neonatal ventilator units are unused because nursing staff cannot be hired to operate them. It says that some cancer patients are being sent home because of shortages of chemotherapy drugs.
Saleh al Dali, senior nursing officer in Shifa's haematology and oncology ward, said that one of his young patients with cancer was now receiving only symptomatic relief. At her daughter's bedside, the patient's mother said: “We have nothing to do with Fatah or Hamas. But we are paying the price. We are always facing pressures, but now they want the Palestinians to overturn their government.”
Although it is Gaza's Shifa Hospital—where officials say that four patients have already died because their dialysis had to be reduced from three times to twice a week—has been worst hit, the report also highlights mounting problems in the West Bank.
Nablus's main Rafidia Hospital, it says, has an “acute shortage” of anaesthetics and of drugs for kidney diseases. It says that only 60% of staff are working, because 40%, in their third month without a salary, cannot afford to get to work.
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel pointed out that its snapshot of the Palestinian health crisis comes a week after a decision in principle by the international “quartet” of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia, along with Israel, to release emergency aid through a trust fund.
Details of the fund are still being worked out by the EU.
On Sunday the Israeli government's cabinet agreed to start using part of the $50m (£27m; €39m) a month in customs duties it is currently withholding from the Palestinian Authority to channel medical aid directly to Palestinian health centres through a range of charities.
Earlier the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had described claims of a humanitarian crisis as “for the time being total propaganda” but insisted that Israel would buy any necessary medicine and deliver it directly to Palestinian hospitals.
“We wouldn't allow one baby to suffer one night because of a lack of dialysis,” he told the New York Times ahead of his visit to Washington, DC, this week (www.nytimes.com, “Israel will buy supplies for Gaza hospitals, premier says,” 19 May).
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Collapse of the Palestinian Health System is available at www.phr.org.il/phr.
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