This story is so incredible on so many levels. It describes the truth about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but the media isn’t drawing the obvious conclusions.
Desperate efforts to save the lives of two critically ill infants in Gaza ended in tragedy after medical transfers to Israel were paralysed by tensions over its planned annexation moves in the occupied West Bank.
Last week, three days before he was due to undergo heart surgery in Israel, eight-month-old Omar Yaghi died in Gaza.
Anwar Harb, who died on Monday, nine days after birth, also had cardiac problems that required a medical transfer to Israel that never came through, a Gaza-based rights group said.
A month ago, Palestinian officials suspended civil and security coordination, voicing anger over the looming annexation steps. As a result, border crossing permits for Gazans seeking treatment in Israeli hospitals are more difficult to arrange and no longer go through normal channels.
The Palestinian Authority wanted to show its displeasure to Israel for the potential extension of sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. So it decided to screw its own people, and even let babies die.
Pro-Palestinian idiots are very offended when people point out that Palestinians don’t seem to care about the lives of their own people very much. But what other conclusion can you draw here? Abbas knew quite well that coordination with Israel saves lives of medical patients, and he preferred to let them die. In the twisted minds of Palestinian leaders, dead children are better than working with Israel.
That is a sick, immoral, disgusting position to take. But no one is saying that out loud.
Haitham Al-Hadra, director of medical referrals in the Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank city of Ramallah, acknowledged it has stopped coordinating entry permits with Israel's official liaison office, known as COGAT.
Under a new mechanism, "it was left to the patients and the hospital to arrange the coordination", he said, although the ministry would still pay their medical costs.
Some transfers to Israel are still proceeding, via contacts between patients or their families and Israeli human rights groups, a Palestinian official said.
But two Israeli human rights groups said they tried unsuccessfully to get a permit for Omar.
Why are Israeli human rights groups working to save Palestinian baby’s lives, but not Palestinian groups? Why hasn’t someone scrambled to organize a private Gaza group that coordinates transfer with COGAT, which says it is more than willing to help facilitate patient transfers?
There are two main principles that this story illustrates, that are the major themes of the region over the past three decades at least.
The first is that Israelis care about Palestinian lives more than Palestinians do. This is the one major theme of the region in the past three decades. It is not politically correct to mention this, but this is hardly the first, or first hundredth, story where Palestinian leaders showed callous disregard for their own people’s lives to score political points.
The second is that “pro-Palestinian” groups are not pro-Palestinian – they are anti-Israel. People who love Palestinians would try to save their children’s lives, but the “pro-Palestinian” crowd only cares when they can blame Israel. In fact, the only mention of these cases in “pro-Palestinian media” like Electronic Intifada says explicitly that this is all Israel’s fault using the bizarre logic that the Israelis who are the only ones trying to save Gazans’ lives are responsible for the deaths that occur when Palestinians practically bar the Gazans from getting Israeli medical attention.
If your enemy can help save your peoples’ lives, you swallow your pride and work with your enemy. But Palestinian leaders and their apologists – in the name of morality and justice – say the opposite, that human lives are not worth the feeling of shame that comes from your enemy actually showing compassion to you.
This sad story show the clear distinction Israelis and Palestinians, between moral and immoral, between valuing human life and using humans as political pawns that can be discarded as easily as a candy wrapper.