Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has damaged the health of the civilian population, a report from the charity Médecins du Monde has said. Since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000, the charity has noted a “general deterioration in the state of health of patients [seen] in medical centres, related to the limit of access to health care.”
Figure 1.
A clinic in Nablus after a search by Israeli troops
Credit: MÉDECINS DU MONDE
The report places the blame at the feet of the Israeli defence forces. As the occupying power, Israel should be bound by the Fourth Geneva Convention on protection of the civil population in time of war, says the charity.
Central to these provisions is the legal requirement to facilitate evacuation and rapid treatment of sick and wounded people, but Médecins du Monde lists dozens of examples of ambulances and patients being delayed at roadblocks, sometimes with fatal consequences. All ambulances are delayed and searched, and many are never allowed to pass. Often they have to transfer patients to other ambulances waiting beyond the checkpoint.
The gravest charges laid against the Israeli military is that medical personnel are sometimes “directly targeted by the armed forces.” These claims are backed up by witness statements from ambulance personnel. In one case an ambulance driver recorded that a tank suddenly opened fire on his vehicle at close range while he waited in a queue at a military checkpoint.
Israeli soldiers often conduct searches of hospitals and clinics, which are protected facilities under the Geneva Conventions, according to the report. The Nasser Hospital at Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip has been “attacked” 15 times since the second Intifada began, says the charity. On each occasion, personnel or patients have been injured by bullets penetrating the hospital's walls.
Less dramatic but ultimately most damaging of all is the network of roadblocks that make travel within the occupied territories so difficult for Arabs, says Médecins du Monde, a medical, humanitarian organisation, which has 5500 volunteers, across the world.
A spokeswoman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry said: “Nobody wants to hinder ambulances, but on several occasions in the past they have been used to carry weapons and even bombers.” The spokes-woman mentioned two other instances in which weapons or bombs had been discovered in ambulances at checkpoints. See News Extra at bmj.com
The report can be downloaded from www.medecinsdumonde.co.uk/news/index.htm