PARIS, 4 March 2002 — Two leading officials of French group Medecins du Monde have issued an urgent appeal for help in connection with the deteriorating health situation in Gaza and the West Bank.
Dr. Marcel-Francis Kahn, a professor of medicine, and Philippe Luxereau, a heart specialist, both of whom recently returned from Palestine, claimed during a press briefing in Paris that too many Palestinians had become the “health hostages of Sharon” largely because Israeli forces were “restraining their access” to medical services.
The two doctors, who were joined by Leila Shahid, the Palestinian representative to France, denounced the “flagrant violations” by Israeli forces of the Geneva Conventions, notably those articles that concern the rights during wartime of civilian populations.
Drs. Kahn and Luxereau said the sanitary conditions were particularly bad at two camps located at Balata and Jenine, neither of which could offer hospitalization to their wounded. Moreover, they noted, victims of the war could not be evacuated for treatment elsewhere because of Israeli encirclement of the camps. Mrs. Shahid noted that Dr. Moussa Abou Hameid, director of hospitals for the Palestinian Health Ministry, confirmed to her by phone that the situation had become “catastrophic.”
Luxereau reported, for his part, that according to information he had received from the Red Crescent, some thirty Palestinian civilians had already died because they had no access to medical treatment as a result of Israeli encirclement of Balata and Jenine. He said he had also learned that more than two-thirds of all ambulances available in Palestine had been damaged since the start of the second intifada.
The two doctors also revealed that other segments of the population had been adversely affected by the precarious sanitary situation in Palestine, as they no longer had access to appropriate medical treatment.
Pregnant women on the way to hospital often were obliged to give birth at Israeli checkpoints, small children had died because they were deprived of timely medical assistance, as were older patients being treated for heart problems or undergoing dialysis.
Also contributing to the “catastrophic” situation of health care in Palestine, said Kahn and Luxereau, was the decision by Israel to levy exorbitant customs duties on medical equipment being taken into Palestine by foreign medical teams.
Often, too, said the doctors, once the fees were paid, the arrival of the teams and their equipment at medical facilities was unnecessarily delayed by Israeli authorities.
As for the general population, they warned, its situation too had worsened in recent weeks, serious nutritional problems had appeared in certain localities, and the “psychological development” of Palestinian children had also been severely affected by the constant bombardment and their effective inability to attend classes.
