Add Category
Posted
The medical referral could not have been clearer: "Top Urgent" it read, yet nothing about Baby Bara'a Ghaben's health was given any kind of priority at all.
"They told us he needed urgent heart surgery outside of Gaza in the West Bank or Israel," the baby's 25-year-old father, Mohammad, explained.
The surgery and care the newborn needed were available within a one-hour drive from his home, but just one week after being born, Bara'a died on June 27, 2017, waiting for permission to leave Gaza that never came.
"My baby did not vote for Hamas," Mohammad tells the ABC.
"He wasn't alive when Hamas took over. None of us are Hamas supporters. Not the baby, not his mother or father. It's not Bara'a's fault."
It has been 10 years since the militant Islamist group Hamas took control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank in June 2007.
Since then, Gaza has been subjected to a tight blockade by Israel and then Egypt, but Hamas has maintained its grip on power.
Now, the designated terror group is coming under new pressure. Its political rival, Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, is sick of paying the bills for Hamas to run Gaza.
Fatah is trying to squeeze the militant group by decreasing services to the Strip — like electricity, salaries, and now health care.
"The last few months we've seen this confrontation between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas … that's translated into some pretty tough measures that are being felt across the Gaza Strip," Robert Piper, the UN Humanitarian co-ordinator for Gaza, said.
"We're seeing some pretty clear dotted trends in terms of the health sector that are very troubling from our perspective."
Mr Piper says the first impact was seen when the amount of medicine the Ministry of Health sent to Gaza sharply diminished.
"There was an unambiguously substantial drop in the availability of essential drugs in Gaza. Some 35-40 per cent of essential drugs are now not available," he explained.
"It's been almost three months since a bulk shipment of essential drugs has come from the West Bank to Gaza."
At the end of May and into June, when patients like baby Bara'a applied for urgent financial coverage from the Ministry of Health to receive treatment outside Gaza, many did not receive a reply.
"They didn't tell us exactly that they denied it but the request was ignored. Nobody got back to us," Mohammad said.
"My son's situation was getting worse by the minute. For every minute we waited his condition deteriorated."
Critically ill toddler ignored for more than a week
Subheya Al Aga spent 13 days desperately trying to get her critically ill toddler Yousef transferred out of Gaza.
"I ask God to take revenge on everyone who was responsible for me losing my son," she said with tears streaming down her face.
Yousef, just short of two years old, was admitted to Gaza's Rantissi Hospital on May 30, 2017, with a second episode of Haemolytic Uramic Syndrome, a condition that cannot be treated in Gaza.
"When I took my son to Rantissi Hospital he had a low blood count and his kidneys was not functioning well," Subheya said.
"My son was very sick and his situation was deteriorating."
Yousef's doctors told the ABC they requested an urgent transfer for the child right away, but it took nine days for the Ministry of Health in the West Bank to approve the payment of his treatment outside Gaza.
Subheya says she was then told he could not be transferred until June 13. The day before Yousef was finally due to be moved he developed complete renal failure and fell into a coma.
Yousef was now too ill to be transferred. He died two weeks later.
"If Yousef was born elsewhere, he would have got the proper medical care," Subheya said.
"This is a political game, and our children are paying the price."
The ABC also met with the family of Mousab Ar'aeer who was born with an ectopic heart on June 19 at Shifa hospital in Gaza.
His doctors said the Ministry of Health did not respond to their urgent request to transfer Mousab to an Israeli hospital for surgery. Baby Mousab died on June 26.
'Alarming' statistics challenge Government's continued denial
Despite mounting evidence, the Palestinian Ministry of Health continues to deny any official change in policy regarding patient referrals.
It did not respond to requests for an interview or to our questions about delays for patients or the deaths of baby Yousef, baby Bara'a or baby Mousab.
But new data on patient referrals backs up the ABC's findings.
In a report released this week, The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) said that in March, 2,190 patients from Gaza received financial approval from the Ministry of Health to be treated outside the strip.
But last month, the centre said this dropped to just 400 patients, a decline of more than 75 per cent. A source at a United Nations agency in Gaza told the ABC the PCHR data was "extremely alarming" and matched trends observed by UN staff in the Strip.
On July 4, 2017, the Palestinian Ministry of Health held a meeting with all the different NGOs working on health care in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Ministry then posted on Facebook claiming representatives from the World Health Organisation (WHO) had visited hospitals and reported, "everything was working as usual".
But the ABC understands no such visits occurred and the WHO made no such statements.
Concern over patient referrals is now being expressed at the highest levels of the United Nation's mission in Jerusalem.
"Someone appears to be taking some steps at least to slow down the approval process. That's very troubling indeed," The UN's Mr Piper said.
"The Government keeps reassuring us that no punitive measures are being taken in terms of financing, but without question the numbers tell a different story."
Thousands of patients wait with bated breath
The ABC has learnt there is now a backlog of more than 2,500 patients in Gaza waiting for financial approval from the Ministry of Health in Ramallah, including children.
Marah, 11, is one of them.
"In the past we had no problems with referrals," Marah's mother Suzan Gndia said.
"We never missed an appointment before."
But since April, Suzan said Marah had missed four appointments at an Israeli hospital to receive treatment for her Thalassemia Major (a severe blood disorder) and to prepare for a liver transplant.
Marah looked weak and just smiled when we asked about her pain. She was weeks behind in her complex treatment schedule that greatly improves her quality of life.
"We really are arguing and asking to de-politicise health. It cannot be that politics is going at the expense of vulnerable Gaza patients," Dr Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said.
The WHO says obtaining financial approval was not the only hurdle facing desperately ill Gazans.
"You need medical approval, financial approval and security approval by Israel to obtain services that you need as a patient," Dr Rockenschaub said.
In the past, 90 per cent of patients who applied to leave Gaza received their security clearances from Israel, but The WHO said this had dropped dramatically.
Their latest data showed more than 50 per cent of patients had their requests either denied or delayed by Israeli security services.
"We have some evidence that some patients unfortunately die while they are on the waiting list to get the permit approval from the Israelis," Dr Rockenschaub said.
Mother of nine dies waiting for chemotherapy
In February, doctors feared 53-year-old widow Farha al Fayoumi's breast cancer was spreading. They referred her to Jerusalem for radio chemotherapy, yet another treatment not available in the Strip.
Farha submitted three applications to Israeli security officials to obtain permission to leave. But her permit to leave Gaza was denied.
The mother of nine died on April 15, 2017, one of four patients the WHO says has died so far this year in Gaza due to delays or denials of security permits from Israel.
"What could my Mum do? My Mum was ill in bed, she spent all of her time in hospital or at home, how she can be a security threat?" Farha's 22-year-old daughter, Haneen, asked, cying.
"She suffered a lot. When she was in pain, she would say, 'I want to run to Israel's hospital to get medical help, I want to beg them to treat me not for me, just for my kids, nothing more'."
The Israeli intelligence service, the Shin Bet, told the ABC it had good reasons to block patients like Farha leaving Gaza.
"This is an issue of entry of residents from a hostile territory," a spokesperson for the Israeli security service said in a statement.
"They are under the control of the terrorist organisations, led by Hamas, who have repeatedly exploited the humanitarian approach to promote terror attacks in Israel and to establish terror infrastructures.
"In recent years, tens of thousands of residents from the Gaza Strip have entered Israel, following security checks, most of them for medical treatment."
The Israelis point to an incident in April this year when a 59-year-old Gazan woman was arrested as she travelled with her ill sister out of the strip. Israeli officials said they found explosive materials in her luggage.
"I was completely outraged. It gives absolute ammunition to the security people in the Israeli system that say every potential sick person is potentially a fraudulent claim," Mr Piper said.
"Every sick person pays the price for that act and we condemn it absolutely, unambiguously."
The UN aid official blamed all sides for playing politics with patients' lives in Gaza.
"No-one comes out of this looking good, whether you're Hamas, whether you're the Palestinian Authority, or indeed whether you're the Israeli Government," he said.
"Our message is the same to everyone, which is: there are some things that need to be protected. Access to urgent health care for a very sick person is one of those issues that we really all need to respect."
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, territorial-disputes, government-and-politics, world-politics, palestinian-territory-occupied