Korean Job Discussion Forums

[arjuna]

Behind the Wall

'Medical Conditions caused by Political Decisions'

By Rich Wiles

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18303.htm

09/03/07 "ICH" -- On Christmas Eve in 1952, a Swiss priest called Father Schnydrig was on his way to Mass at the Church of the Nativity. He had come to Palestine to celebrate in the birthplace of Jesus. He walked past a huge area filled with tents and saw a man attempting to bury a child. This was Dehaishah Refugee Camp. The man was digging in the mud to create a makeshift grave for his own son. His son had literally frozen to death. Father Schnydrig began to question his own place in Bethlehem and wondered how he could be in the city to celebrate the birthplace of Jesus whilst children were suffering so much within a kilometer of the church. Upon returning to Europe he began to fundraise and soon opened Caritas Children's Hospital in Bethlehem.

[....]

The effects of the Occupation are varied and widespread. Children injured by the IOF are not brought to Caritas as it has no emergency casualty unit, instead they are taken to state hospitals in Bethlehem. But saying that, a very high percentage of all children in the hospital have conditions which in some way relate to the political situation.

Walking around the hospital it is hard not to be impressed by the facilities and the standard of care, but another very striking thing is the size of most of the children. Children suffering from serious malnutrition are regularly brought into the hospital, but as I am taken around the hospital by some of the many dedicated staff they begin to explain to me about F.T.T. - Failure To Thrive. The majority of the children at Caritas are not from the cities of Bethlehem or Al Khalil but from the refugee camps and villages in the area. The environmental and social conditions in these areas are much lower than inside the cities. Poverty levels are higher, and subsequently diet suffers, heating is insufficient through the winter, and access to clean drinking water is also a major problem. One tiny child catches my attention as her huge brown eyes gaze at me inquisitively. After covering myself with a face mask, a gown, and gloves to prevent spread of infection, a doctor takes me over to meet her:

"Lama is from Al Khadr village. She is ten months old but has the growth parameters of a baby less than four months old. Her mother had no milk to feed her with so she simply couldn't grow. Her parents haven�t been here in a month now."

A lot of the children are suffering from gastro-intestinal problems, which can manifest itself as sickness and diarrhea. Such problems are common in children worldwide but in Palestine, as in many parts of the unprivileged world, children are dying from such conditions. Parents do not have the money to pay for hospital care so are often delaying going to hospital until it is almost too late. And as another doctor explained in some cases it is too late by the time children reach the hospital:

"A few months ago a man brought his son in. They had no money at all and felt ashamed to beg for help so they put off seeking treatment hoping the condition would improve with time. Eventually the family got very desperate as their child deteriorated and they took him to a Government hospital. When they got there the hospital couldn't treat him as all doctors were striking, and they were sent here. The child died within a few hours of getting here, it was just too late."

[....]

Many of the children here suffer from some form of anaemia, another condition directly related to poor nutrition. One child I saw had 80% iron deficiency anaemia. Iron is vital in the first few months of life for amongst other things development of IQ and this child has been found to be suffering from incorrect psychological development as well as physical problems. So these are some of effects of the policy which Bush and Blair promoted last year because they didn't like the democratic choice of the Palestinian people:

"We found things got a lot worse after the Intifada began and again since last years blockade things have deteriorated greatly. Nutritional care has suffered a lot. Mothers cannot produce milk so are using powdered milk but it is being diluted so heavily because of the families poverty levels that it has virtually no nutritional value. It is also being made with dirty water."

Another very evident factor at Caritas is a disturbing lack of parents in the hospital with their children:

"We find this to be another major problem, particularly from the camps and villages around Al Khalil. This baby here for example is from Yatta (a town south of Al Khalil). She has Short Bowel Syndrome, a twisted intestine. She also suffers from various nutritional deficiencies, anaemia, and FTT. She has been with us since just after birth and her parents have not been to see her in over two months now. Yatta is a very poor town and her parents simply cannot afford the transport to get here, they have other children to feed at home..."

Walking around the hospital I see rooms and rooms full of tiny babies suffering from conditions in some way related to social conditions and poverty, children whose eyes light up when I walk in at seeing a new face. Some smile up at me with the beauty of new life, others cry almost constantly. One baby is so tiny I am sure she must have been born very prematurely but as we look through her notes we find that in fact she was born after a full term of pregnancy. She is now four months old but seems no bigger than a bag of sugar. The doctors go on to tell me of other children brought in, carried in their fathers arms, carried in like babies, but in fact these children are not babies but three, four, or five years old. They simply cannot grow - this is FTT at its most severe.

In the winter, children such as the child described earlier with frozen feet, are being brought in with temperatures as low as 32 degrees, particularly from the camps and villages, because their houses have insufficient heating, or in some cases no heating at all. Not all children brought into Caritas can be treated at the hospital. The hospital has built strong links with hospitals inside Israel and some children are sent to hospitals there if they cannot be treated at Caritas. This is particularly the case with major operations. But this procedure also faces many problems. Endless paperwork must be completed and then the child will be put into an ambulance: but this ambulance is permitted to travel only a few hundred metres up to Bethlehem checkpoint. It can go no further. It can go no further because it is Palestinian. Even ambulances are not allowed passage through the checkpoints to hospitals in Israel irrespective of paperwork. So at the checkpoint a child will be unloaded from the ambulance and an Israeli ambulance will wait to collect the child to continue the journey. And once the child is safely in the hospital inside Israel where are his or her parents? They are invariably stuck behind the other side of the Apartheid Wall to their child, unable to get permission from the Occupation to themselves visit and care for their sick children during their hospital treatment. In one recent case from Caritas a baby in an incubator was held up at Bethlehem Checkpoint for a couple of hours before the soldiers finally allowed him to be transferred to the waiting Israeli ambulance.

The doctors at Caritas have also, since the start of the Intifada, found incredibly high numbers of very young children suffering from a rare strain of cancer behind the eye. They have been unable to pinpoint exactly what is causing this and it is not being found in neighbouring countries which leads the doctors to believe it is possibly a chemical toxin being used by the Occupation. They have been researching the possibility that it could be caused by tear-gas but have so far been unable to categorically prove this theory. Premature birth and miscarriage as a result of shock caused during IOF attacks is also widely seen.

The work of all the staff at Caritas Children's Hospital is admirable. The faces and tiny, weak bodies of the patients are heartbreaking, wanting eyes looking out of shallow faces pleading for help. Palestine diminishes day by day. It gets smaller and smaller. It cannot thrive and its children suffer from a Failure to Thrive. It cannot develop, and its children illustrate that fact through their continued development of poverty related illnesses. These are medical conditions caused by political decisions.

[arjuna]

Palestinians: The Crisis in Medical Care

By Richard Horton

The New York Review of Books
Volume 54, Number 4 � March 15, 2007
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19974

1.

"Nothing is changing," says Dr. Jamil Suliman, a pediatrician and now the director of Beit Hanoun Hospital in Gaza. On a quiet January morning, he shows me a clean and well-equipped emergency room, modern X-ray facilities, a pharmacy, and a basic yet functioning laboratory. Dr. Suliman oversees a medical team of more than fifty doctors. But the outlook for the health and well-being of his community, three quarters of whom live in accelerating poverty, is not good.

Beit Hanoun sits close to the border of Gaza, a twenty-five-by-five-mile strip of land that is one of the most densely populated and impoverished regions in the world today. As a meeting point between Asia and Africa, Gaza has been fiercely fought over for centuries. With the dismantling of Israeli settlements on the strip in 2005, this tract of land is now wholly Palestinian. Yet its people have hardly any control over their lives, their movements, or their economy. And so Gaza's troubles have not receded.

Gaza exists in a cage. I entered through the Erez checkpoint at its northern tip. Armed Israel Defense Forces and bored young military conscriptees control the cylindrical steel turnstiles and electric gates that greet visitors. After walking through a three-hundred-meter camera-laden concrete tunnel, one exits into a landscape of bombed homes, blasted roads and bridges, and fields torn apart by armored vehicles. The debris of Palestinian life lines the road into Gaza City. Vans loaded with young Palestinian members of armed militias pass by freely. Men carrying Kalashnikovs stand at most street corners in the center of the city. Gaza feels like a lawless place under permanent siege.

Gaza is also a land of children. Sixty percent of its 1.5 million people are under eighteen. Children spill out of every home onto dusty and dirty alleyways. They drive donkey carts that carry everything from people to bananas. Children weave their bodies and bicycles between the cars that engorge Gaza's narrow city streets. Young smartly dressed Palestinian girls carry their clipboards to and from school. (With families often having as many as seven children, the demand for schooling is high. Teachers run several classroom shifts daily to meet the rising need.) Early each morning, one can watch children standing in shallow boats on Gaza's beautiful Mediterranean shoreline, pulling in their nightly catches.

In a survey completed by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, over 90 percent of children below the age of eleven experience severe anxiety, nightmares, and physical expressions of stress, such as bed-wetting. Half fear that their parents will not be able to provide essential family necessities, such as food and a home. Forty percent have relatives who died during the second intifada, which began in 2000.

[...]

The best that might be hoped for right now is a scaled-up response by civil society�people and organizations independent of government. Dr. Yousef Mousa, who chairs the Union of Health Work Committees, offers one example of what can be achieved in the face of apparent hopelessness.

In 1985, he created a volunteer organization to assist marginalized Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. He began in two rented rooms in the Jabaliya refugee camp. His organization has now grown to become the largest local NGO, providing primary care and hospital facilities throughout the Gaza Strip. His ambitious goal is to deliver comprehensive programs for physical, mental, and social well-being to all Palestinians. In Gaza, for example, he employs 350 staff members, who include both Muslims and Christians.

Visiting his clinics and the al-Awda Hospital in Gaza City, I was struck by the astonishing scope of Dr. Mousa's project. He offers legal advice as well as health education to women. He provides a well-stocked library for children of all ages. He organizes dancing and life-skills classes, Internet access, speech therapy, and a safe haven for children to come and play during school vacations.

Dr. Mousa is a large, jovial man. He is not immune to the realities of his work. As we drive the length of the Gaza Strip, he holds a Kalashnikov for security reasons in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He is disappointed by the lack of support he receives from many international humanitarian aid agencies. He is especially scathing about the lack of help he gets from the World Health Organization.

The US and European Union are unfairly punishing Palestinians for electing a Hamas-led government, he says. Worse still, the cessation of Western aid is jeopardizing his efforts to protect civilian lives. While Dr. Mousa does not sanction an academic boycott of Israel (in contrast with many other Gazan doctors and health sector groups) or violence against Israel, he refuses to submit to anti-terrorist vetting procedures imposed by Ameri-can donors. He welcomes transparent evaluation of his work, he says, but he will not accept money tied to conditions. The current pressure being exerted on Palestinians is, he tells me, nothing less than "torture."

[...]

Israeli forces are deployed throughout this part of the West Bank. When they saw villagers building a school, they intervened to stop them. According to the village's leader, Abu-Ibrahim, Israeli officials have issued nineteen written and verbal warnings, promising to demolish both the school and the clinic. The most recent letters date from 2006. I saw one of these letters, which was written in both Arabic and Hebrew. It came from the Inspection Committee of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria.

Referring to previous warnings, the Israeli authorities said that they had provided villagers with ample time and opportunity to justify their actions. But the inspection committee was now "convinced that the building has been completed without legal permission." The villagers had to remove what they had constructed within seven days: "If you do not comply, legal procedures will be implemented, including the destruction of the building." The site would have to be restored to its original state, the villagers were told, at "your own expense."

The clinic in this small school has already saved dozens of villagers' lives. If it were demolished, their health would be left to the mercy of chance. In what amounts, in Abu-Ibrahim's view, to nothing less than a provocative act of humiliation, the Israelis have built a brand-new school for their own settlements, together with a swimming pool, on the promontory directly opposite Khirbet Zakariya. It is not humanly possible to believe that the Israelis, under cover of imprecise security concerns, wish to destroy this small and already fragile Palestinian community, depriving its children of education. But their strictly enforced policies are leading to exactly this: wholesale de-development of rural Palestinian villages.

[...]

What does the future hold for the health and the well-being o Palestinians? In the absence of reconciliation, both are unlikely to undergo reversal of their current precipitous decline. A position of permanen dependency on Israel and on external aid seems probable, perhaps fatall disabling the already handicapped Palestinian Authority. Partly this i because of political infighting among Palestinian elites and continue episodes of violence against Israelis. Partly it is because Palestinians hav been unable to make use of the press and televi-sion to present their story i a strong and convincing way to the world [9] Partly it is because powerful mem-bers of the international community have abandoned the Palestinian people, relying on the convenient but cruel excuse that the democratically elected Hamas government continues to hold positions it finds objectionable. Partly it is because the Israeli government prefers to reject any humanitarian impulse to assist Palestinians, let alone adhere to its past commitments to end the occupation of Palestinian land.

Western governments have demanded that Hamas renounce violence, recognize Israel, and honor previously signed accords before questions of Israeli settlements, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the fate of East Jerusalem, and the creation of permanent borders can even be raised.[10] But a sense of profound historical and current injustice is palpable in every encounter one has with Palestinians and cannot be ignored by the Quartet�the US, the European Union, Russia, and the UN�as it reflects on how to reactivate the peace process. Demands made by the international community, however reasonable they might seem, imply for many Palestinians I talked to that they should abandon resistance, renounce many of their claims, and ignore Israel's own record of violence and its violations of past agreements, especially during the nearly forty years of occupation. Such demands, I was told, have little hope of acceptance. They will be seen by most Palestinians as further concessions for which they can expect no reward. Unless something tangibly positive can be delivered to ordinary Palestinians, a violent, even if self-defeating, conflict seems likely to continue.

There is one element of hope. Palestinians have an undimmed engagement with their future. Discouraged and immobilized they may be, but their commitment to the creation of a Palestinian homeland�a nation-state�remains very much intact. Every conversation I had about health turned to politics sooner or later, and usually with heightened passion. Palestinian health workers are not passive observers in a political process. Through civil society organizations such as the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and the Union of Health Work Committees, they are daily inventing the systems and institutions to protect the health of their people now and in the future. In short, Palestinians are laying the foundation for sustainable self-reliance in a territory where people have reluctantly come to understand that they can rely on no one but themselves. The struggle over Palestine was once a battle against an occupier over territorial self-determination. It is now an urgent fight for self-preservation.

�February 14, 2007