Coalition of churches fights for Palestinian health rights
10/15/2003 News media contact: Tim Tanton · (615) 742-5470 · Nashville, Tenn.
This report is a sidebar to UMNS story #490. Photos are available.
By Paul Jeffrey*
Dr.
Mazen Anabtawi gives water to a patient at the Action by Churches
Together-supported St. Luke's Hospital in Nablus. The hospital is run by
the Anglican Church. Action by Churches Together provides critical
assistance to its member agencies carrying out health care delivery
throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. A UMNS photo by Paul
Jeffrey / ACT. Photo number 03-360, Accompanies UMNS #491, 10/14/03
No Long Caption Available for this Story
A
3-year-old Palestinian boy, Amr Qanadilo, was shot by Israeli snipers
in September 2002 and now receives treatment at Jerusalem's Action by
Churches Together-supported Augusta Victoria Hospital, run by the
Lutheran World Federation. A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey / ACT. Photo
number 03-357, Accompanies UMNS #491, 10/14/03
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Children of War. Photo number W03042, Accompanies UMNS#490
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A
woman and her child wait in the health center in the Ama'ri Refugee
Camp in Ramallah. Action by Churches Together supports a physician in
the clinic. A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey / ACT. Photo number 03-358,
Accompanies UMNS #491, 10/14/03
No Long Caption Available for this Story
A
Palestinian woman, comforted by her sister, receives kidney dialysis
treatment at East Jerusalem's Action by Churches Together-supported
Augusta Victoria Hospital, run by the Lutheran World Federation. Action
by Churches Together provides critical assistance to its member agencies
carrying out health care delivery throughout the occupied Palestinian
territories. A UMNS photo by Paul Jeffrey / ACT. Photo number 03-359,
Accompanies UMNS #491, 10/14/03
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Daily Life
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JERUSALEM (UMNS)-The right of Palestinians to
access quality health care continues to be impaired by the Israeli
occupation of the Palestinian territories, so hospitals supported by
Action by Churches Together International are reaching out in new ways
to deliver health care to isolated and besieged communities.
The United Methodist Committee on Relief is an active member of ACT.
A
major problem, according to hospital administrators, is that the
Israeli military has severely limited the access of Palestinians to
health care facilities since the current intifada, or popular uprising,
began in 2000.
Towns and villages are placed under curfew, earth
and rubble are bulldozed into piles that block roads, and checkpoints
run by Israeli soldiers regularly refuse to let Palestinians pass.
Hundreds of people have died because patients traveling in ambulances or
on their own were prevented from reaching clinics and hospitals.
Travel
restrictions under Israel's state of siege constitute "a flagrant
breach of human rights" that "impairs the ability of the sick to reach
hospitals for treatment and of ambulances to transport the sick and
wounded," according to a report by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights
group that monitors conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Tawfiq
Nasser, executive director of August Victoria Hospital in East
Jerusalem, concurs. "Access is part of the definition of quality health
care, and it's a fundamental right for any patient to access their
health care provider."
Besides patients who can't get to the
hospital, Nasser says staff are also blocked or delayed when they travel
from their home to work. "So the hospital has to expend enormous
amounts of funding to try and cover for them, to transport them back and
forth."
Perched on the Mount of Olives, Augusta Victoria
Hospital is run by the Lutheran World Federation. Two-thirds of the
hospital's patients come from refugee camps, and the 100-bed facility is
a key referral hospital for the region. Yet patients often face an
overwhelming odyssey in order to reach the hospital, at times passing
through three or four checkpoints just to enter East Jerusalem.
"As
a result, patients come to us, when they do come to us, much later,
much sicker, much more acute, which means we have to spend more money,
give more medication, practice more interventions. That makes the
emergency impact us financially," Nasser says.
Funding from ACT
has been "the spinal cord" of the hospital's operations during the last
two years, according to Nasser. In addition to helping the hospital
treat direct casualties of the conflict, ACT funds are used to transport
patients in and out of closed regions. For some patients, like those
needing kidney dialysis every two or three days, ACT funding has helped
Augusta Victoria house them on the hospital grounds.
ACT has also
made it possible for Augusta Victoria to send medical professionals
into isolated areas and dispatch "mobile clinics" to four rural
villages. A trauma surgeon supported by ACT provides critical care in
the hospital in Qalqilya, a town along the West Bank's border with
Israel that has been isolated by an eight meter-high concrete
"separation fence" constructed by the Israelis. Another ACT-supported
physician provides orthopedic services at a clinic in the besieged
southern city of Hebron.
At the Ama'ri refugee camp in Ramallah,
Augusta Victoria uses ACT funding to provide a pediatrician for the
United Nations-run clinic. In several besieged villages around
Bethlehem, an ACT-supported midwife assists with prenatal care and
childbirths.
In the overcrowded Gaza Strip, between Israel and
the Mediterranean Sea, another ACT-supported hospital has had to adjust
its practice of medicine to the state of siege. "Before, patients came
to us. Now we have to go to them," says Suhaila Tarazi, director of the
Ahli Arab Hospital, a ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.
The hospital daily buses in patients from remote villages, often just
women and children since Israeli soldiers regularly prohibit men from
passing through the checkpoints.
The hospital experienced the
violence directly Jan. 24, when an Israeli guided missile, fired from a
U.S.-supplied Apache helicopter, slammed into St. Philip's Episcopal
Chapel in the middle of the hospital complex. The hospital suffered
extensive damage and an elderly patient had a fatal heart attack. Church
officials noted that the complex was clearly marked with Red Cross
flags.
According to Dr. Maher Ayyad, the hospital's chief
surgeon, the state of siege has left the people of Gaza and the hospital
feeling isolated from the rest of the world. "Before the intifada, we
had Israeli surgeons come here once a week to help out, and they often
took patients with them back to Tel Aviv.
"We used to have a
surgeon or a specialist come here every month from the United States or
Britain, but since the tensions have grown, they are too scared to
come," he adds. "We used to send off our physicians to train and
specialize in other countries, and we could refer patients to hospitals
outside of Gaza. But now we watch patients die because we can't send
them elsewhere." # # # *Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary
in Central America who traveled to the Palestinian territories as a
field communicator for Action by Churches Together.
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