In the early afternoon a
mortar wounded three Israeli Arabs who work as taxi drivers tasked with
taking a group of Gazans from the crossing into Israel for medical
care. Roughly an hour later, the IAF hit the site from where the mortar
was launched.
The attack took place
at the Erez Crossing in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council while a goup
of ill Palestinians was making the crossing. Soldiers evacuated the
wounded as mortars continued to fall.
One of the Palestinian attemtping to make the crossing spoke to Ynet
and said "the war does what it wants with us. I hope both sides put an
end to it. There is too much fear in Gaza and in Israel. All we wanted
was to get medical care."
...
Abed Ra'asab, from
East Jerusalm, arrived at the crossing to transfer a young relative of
his suffering cancer to a hospital in Jeruslam and witnessed the scene.
When he arrived at the Palestinian side of the crossing the attack
began. "It was so close, but thank God I was close to a shelter, those
wounded were farther away. The (IDF) paramedics quickly took care of the
wounded.
The mortar hit one of the few active crossings connecting Israel to
Gaza, specifically the one intended for human passage. A car belonging
to one of the Israeli-Arabs sustained damage. A young Palestinian girl
who was at the crossing suffered anxiety and she was seen shaking from
fear.
Still waiting to hear any international condemnation of Hamas (which has taken responsibility) for firing on wounded 'Palestinians.' I don't expect to hear any.
Meanwhile, an Israeli hospital plays footsie with Mrs. Bluff
As the IDF combs the Hebron area searching for three teenagers who were abducted by 'Palestinian' terrorists on Thursday night, Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv is treating the wife of 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud AbbasAbu Mazen.This is from the first link.
As Israel frantically searched for three abducted teens, Amina Abbas,
the wife of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas
underwent treatment in a Tel Aviv hospital, according to a just-released
report.
Abbas was hospitalized on the seventh floor of the orthopedic
neuro-surgery department at the private Assuta Medical Center
last Thursday, reportedly for minor foot surgery, according to Israeli
daily Yediot Ahronot. She was released on Sunday.
Abbas’ wife was under heavy guard, the report said, and Israeli officials have, so far, refused to discuss the case.
“Assuta does not disclose information about who is hospitalized or
being treated at its facility, out of concern for patient privacy, and
as a result, can neither confirm or deny any details relating to the
patient,” a hospital official said.
...
There was no word who covered the cost of treatment, but Israel commonly
foots the bill for the thousands of Palestinians being treated in the
country.
Unbelievable. And they said that Israelis try not to be friers?
The New York Times actually runs a story that's favorable to Israel
It's been going on for months, but with an increase in civilians being treated, the New York Times has finally deemed it fit to print: Israel is treating casualties of the Syrian civil war at Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, Ziv Hospital in Safed, Rambam Hospital in Haifa and at a field hospital in the Golan Heights. They're getting better medical care than they could ever get in Syria, and the government of Israel is footing the bill (Hat Tip: Tamar H).
“Most come here unconscious with head injuries,” said Dr. Masad Barhoum, the director general of theWestern Galilee Hospitalhere in Nahariya, on the Mediterranean coast six miles south of the Lebanese border. “They wake up after a few days or whenever and hear a strange language and see strange people,” he said. “If they can talk, the first question is, ‘Where am I?’ ”
He added, “I am sure there is an initial shock when they hear they are in Israel.”
The identity of the patients is closely guarded so they will not be in danger when they return to Syria. Soldiers sit outside the wards where the adults are to protect them from possible threats and prying journalists. But doctors granted access to the children in the closed intensive care wing, on the condition that no details that could compromise their safety were published.
Like many Israeli hospitals, this one serves a mixed population of Jews and Arabs; its staff includes Arabic-speaking doctors, nurses and social workers. In the lobby, a glass display case contains the remnants of a Katyusha rocket that was fired from Lebanon and hit the hospital’s eye department during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah. The rocket penetrated four floors but nobody was injured because all the north-facing wards had been moved underground.
With more than 100,000 people estimated to have died in the Syrian civil war, Dr. Barhoum, an Arab Christian citizen of Israel, acknowledged that the Israeli medical assistance was “a drop in the ocean.”
But he said he was proud of the level of treatment his teams could provide and proud to be a citizen of a country that allowed him to treat every person equally. He said the cost of the treatment so far had amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars and would be paid for by the Israeli government.
Since late March, almost 100 Syrians have arrived at two hospitals in Galilee. Forty-one severely wounded Syrians have been treated here at the Western Galilee Hospital, which has a new neurosurgical unit as well as pediatric intensive care facilities. Two of them have died, 28 have recovered and been transferred back to Syria, and 11 remain here.
An additional 52 Syrians have been taken to theRebecca Sieff Hospitalin the Galilee town of Safed. The latest, a 21-year-old man with gunshot and shrapnel wounds, arrived there on Saturday. A woman, 50, arrived Friday with a piece of shrapnel lodged in her heart and was sent to theRambam hospitalin the northern port city of Haifa for surgery.
Little has been revealed about how they get here, other than that the Israeli military runs the technical side of the operation. The doctors say all they know is that Syrian patients arrive by military ambulance and that the hospital calls the army to come pick them up when they are ready to go back to Syria.
The Israeli military, which also operates a field hospital and mobile medical teams along the Syrian frontier, has been reluctant to advertise these facilities, partly for fear of being inundated by more wounded Syrians than they could cope with.
A Syrian injured in the ongoing Syrian civil war was taken from
treatment at Ziv Hospital in Tzfat. This marks the first time since
Israel began accepting wounded Syrians that a patient had been
previously treated at a Syrian hospital. The doctor who treated the
individual in Syria pinned a note to the patient's clothing with details
of the past medical operation. The note ended with the words, "please
do what is necessary and thank you in advance."
Israel Radio reported that the note was in Arabic. I guess they assumed that there would be a doctor in the Israeli hospital who reads Arabic. Only in Israel....
This is not a parody: World Health Organization condemns Israeli medical care for Syrians and 'Palestinians'
You can't make this stuff up. Israel has set up a field hospital for wounded Syrians on the Golan Heights, it provides regular, critical medical care to the 'Palestinians' regardless of their ability to pay, and it provides medical care that is otherwise unavailable to them to persons throughout the Arab world. And the response? The World Health Organization has condemned Israel for the medical care it provides to Syrians and 'Palestinians
As thousands of people in large swathes of the planet, including
war-torn Syria, are dying daily for lack of adequate medical care, the
one geographic area whose “health conditions” are slated for condemnation
at the World Health Organization’s annual conference is, naturally,
“the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in
the occupied Syrian Golan.”
What makes this surreal isn’t just that the
above areas enjoy far better “health conditions” than much of the rest
of the world. It’s that the Palestinian Authority (Israel’s “peace
partner”), together with Syria and other Arab countries, is seeking to
condemn Israel at a time when it is actively providing medical services
to both Palestinians and Syrians.
The denunciation of health conditions on the Golan is particularly
surreal: Syrians in Syria, where medical care of any kind is often
simply unavailable,
would be thrilled to get the same state-of-the-art care as their
brethren on the Golan–where, as in East Jerusalem, Israeli law applies,
entitling residents to the same services as all other Israelis.
But thanks to Israel, some of those Syrians actually are getting such care–which is doubtless Syrian President Bashar Assad’s real gripe. Israel has quietly set up a field hospital
on the Golan where dozens of Syrians wounded in the civil war have been
treated; others, who need more intensive care, have been transferred to
regular Israeli hospitals.
Israel has also offered treatment to
some Syrian refugees. Just this month, via Israel’s Save a Child’s Heart
program, Israeli doctors saved the life
of a four-year-old Syrian refugee with a serious heart condition.
Similar treatment was offered to three other Syrian children in Jordan
who have similar conditions, but their parents refused: Apparently, they
fell victim to their own anti-Israel propaganda. Still, the doctors are
hoping they will change their minds once the first girl returns to
Jordan healthy and happy.
In the PA and Hamas-run Gaza... they have an advantage most other countries
with similar health-care systems don’t: generous access to Israeli
hospitals for any problems their own can’t treat. And you needn’t take
my word for it: Just this month, after PA Health Minister Hani Abdeen
visited Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital, the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadidareported
that “30% of the patients who are children are Palestinians.” It also
reported that Hadassah is now training some 60 Palestinian doctors, who
will then return to serve the PA’s own population.
Surreal. And a clear demonstration of how Israel must ignore the 'international community.' No matter what we do, we will be condemned.
“In the last meeting I brought a big map, like the size of this whole
table,” recalls Olmert. “With colors for all the regions that go over to
us and the reverse. We would receive 6.3%, they would get 5.8%, but
they also get a safe passage in a tunnel between Gaza and the West Bank
that was the equivalent in territory of the remaining half percent.
Territories that were considered no-man’s-land before 1967 would be
divided 50-50. Ariel would stay with us, and a network of tunnels would
go under the Trans Samaria Highway to ease the passage of Palestinians
in that area. Similarly for the areas of A-Zaim and Hizmeh, since I was
insisting on E-1. There would be a tunnel that would enable Palestinians
to have quick passage between Bethlehem and Ramallah, despite our
control over the territory, and so their territorial contiguity would
not be impaired.”
“At the same time, I gave Abbas territories in the Beit Sh’ean Valley,
next to Tirat Zvi, not far from Afula, in the area of Lachish, in the
area of Katna (next to Har Adar), the northern Judean desert and the
area around the Gaza Strip. I completely gave up on having an Israeli
presence in the Jordan Valley. That was because I could protect the line
of the Jordan River through an international military force on the
other side of the Jordan RIver. There was no opposition on the
Palestinian side to our having a presence in warning stations along the
mountain range.”
Among the other concessions Olmert proposed were the ceding control of
the Temple Mount to an international administration (consisting of the
United Stastes, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine) and allowing
5000 Palestinians to be repatriated to Israel. The report is consistent
- though more detailed than previous reporting on the negotiations.
Ethan Bronner citing Olmert's memoirs and an interview with the ex-Prime
Minister reported a similar account in 2011.
Isacharoff observes regarding Olmert's plan to cede the Jordan Valley to the Palestinians.
Today, such an offer, particularly as it relates to the Jordan Valley,
is all but inconceivable. Given the chaos that has swept the Middle East
since that potentially historic night in September 2008 – with security
now deteriorating or having collapsed in every country bordering Israel
– Olmert’s offer contains elements that are now simply incompatible
with fundamental Israeli interests.
The observation is interesting because in contrasts with an op-ed Olmert wrote for the New York Times in September, 2011, Peace - now or never, regarding the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations.
We Israelis simply do not have the luxury of spending more time
postponing a solution. A further delay will only help extremists on both
sides who seek to sabotage any prospect of a peaceful, negotiated
two-state solution.
Moreover, the Arab Spring has changed the Middle East, and unpredictable
developments in the region, such as the recent attack on Israel’s
embassy in Cairo, could easily explode into widespread chaos. It is
therefore in Israel’s strategic interest to cement existing peace
agreements with its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan.
Isacharoff's observation refutes Olmert's claim. The uncertainty in the
Middle East makes the risks of concessions greater. More generally, the
Palestinian Authority's weakness means that any concessions Israel makes
have to assume that Hamas could well come to power in the not too
distant future.
The mother told reporters she was hesitant about coming to Israel
because it is an enemy country to Syria but also said the only thing
that mattered for her was having the opportunity to save her daughter’s
life.
...
“We kept taking her to doctors and to the hospital but nothing could be
done for her,” the mother said. “She couldn’t run and play like other
children and she was very sick most of the time.”
Dr. Lior Sasson, one of the physicians to volunteer with the SACH
medical team, said the child was in grave condition when she arrived in
Israel and would not have survived much longer. “Without the surgery,
she could have died within a few months, maybe even weeks,” he said.
Since 1995, Save a Child's Heart (SACH) has treated more than 3,000
children suffering from congenital and rheumatic heart disease aging
from infancy to 18 years of age from the “four corners of the Earth” -
45 countries where adequate medical care is unavailable.
Approximately 50% of the children are from the Palestinian Authority,
Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Morocco; more than 30% are from Africa; and the
remaining are from Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas.
Israel is regularly condemned in some venues as a racist state.
Organizations like Save a Child's Heart show that the claim is
absolutely false.
"We received a call around nine in the morning from the Chief Medical
Officer of the Judea and Samaria Division informing us that there was a
boy hospitalized in the Jenin hospital in need of further intensive
care," said Lt. Abed Rabah, Medical Officer of the Menashe Regional
Brigade in the Judea and Samaria Division, according to the blog of the
Israel Defense Forces.
The Division Medical Officer was contacted when the child's condition
escalated after he had been anesthetized and attached to a breathing
tube, which resulted in pulmonary edema – fluid accumulation in the air
spaces of the lungs. The IDF transferred him to the Rambam Healthcare
Campus in Haifa, whose Meyer Children's Hospital specializes in
Pediatric Nephrology Dialysis.
"The most critical issue for us in the first stage was to get him to
breathe on his own again, not mechanically," said Cpl. Jonathan
Friedland, a paramedic with the Judea and Samaria Division.
"The doctors
at the Jenin hospital were unable to get him out of his mechanical
breathing."
The team – consisting of an ambulance driver, a paramedic and a
medical officer – received the child and his mother at the Gilboa-Jalame
crossing, from where they were transported immediately to the Rambam
Health Care Campus, according to the IDF Blog.
"Throughout the ride, we continued supporting him with anesthetics
and kept him connected to a breathing tube," explained Lt. Rabah.
The boy arrived safely at the Haifa healthcare facility and is in stable condition.
"The Muslim boy was taken care of by a Jewish paramedic [and] a Druze
medical officer and was transported in an ambulance driven by a
Christian soldier," said Lt. Rabah.
I wonder what would have happened if God forbid it had been a Jewish patient and members of the 'Palestinian' 'security forces.'
As I am sure many of you are aware, we Jews believe that Simana Miltha Hee (a sign is meaningful) and therefore on Rosh HaShanna we eat things like the head of a fish (so that we will be the head and not the tail), pomegranates (so that we will have merits like the seeds of a pomegranate), fish (so that we will be fruitful and multiply like fish) etc. In our house, we joke about two other signs: We eat meat so that God should bring us good tidings (the word for meat in Hebrew is basar and the word for bringing tidings is l'vaseir) and we eat lettuce, raisins and celery and say 'let us have a raise in salary.'
Israel's medical residents must have eaten a lot of lettuce, raisins and celery two weeks ago and apparently it is going to pay off. Prime Minister Netanyahu has ordered that they be given a raise in salary.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday instructed Finance Ministry representatives involved in negotiations with medical residents to grant young doctors working solely in the public sector a salary hike of thousands of shekels.
The Prime Minister's Office added in a statement that Netanyahu was continuing his efforts to improve conditions for medical residents who have turned in resignation letters as part of a labor dispute.
Earlier on Monday, Netanyahu summoned Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Deputy Health Minister Ya'acov Litzman for an emergency meeting regarding the mass resignation of medical residents earlier in the day. Litzman said they hoped to reach a solution in a short period of time, Army Radio reported.
The state also sought an injunction from the National Labor Court Monday afternoon that would order medical residents to return to work. Several hundred medical residents resigned and did not show up for work Monday morning as part of a labor dispute in the health system.
Following the mass resignation, Steinitz called on the residents to return to work. "We all need to respect the law and the rule of law," Steinitz said in a statement, urging the medical residents to "hold discussions with us. We are looking for creative ways to improve certain things within the already-written agreement with doctors, including additional money."
The government was also considering ordering a transfer of more senior doctors to departments where the residents' absence has created backups. Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein already signed off on such a process, which still needs to be authorized by the director-general of the Health Ministry, Army Radio reported.
I believe it's more important to the public that the young doctors stop working 36-hour shifts. I sleep very little, but I don't make life and death decisions, and I don't see how anyone who has worked 24 hours straight - let alone 36 - can make those decisions (for the record, my record for consecutive hours worked is 42 and after that stretch I would not have trusted myself to make any life and death decisions).
But yes, they are also grossly underpaid. In this country, staj (apprenticeship) is common in many - nearly all - professions. It's slave labor. (When I did staj as a lawyer here, after working for seven years in the US, I was paid $1,000 per month and when I did a $42 million stock offering in the US while I was doing staj - for which my boss was paid $125,000 - he gave me a $400 bonus. No, I am not exaggerating). For the doctors it just goes on much longer.
Medical residents resign, ignoring Netanyahu request for 2 more weeks
For the last several months, Israel's doctors and hospitals have been carrying out labor sanctions. The real underlying issue - which is not being addressed - is the over-involvement of government in the medical system. We saw one result of that in a post that I did on Sunday.
About a month ago, the government reached a settlement with the doctors' union. The doctors - who are so underpaid that in some cities they are allowed to make up for it by seeing patients privately on hospital grounds (known as sharap here in Jerusalem where it exists) - agreed to a settlement that granted them a substantial raise. But the settlement left the medical residents in no better position than they were before. Medical residents here are grossly underpaid (I heard a doctor last week say that his monthly income came to about NIS 7,500 for which he would work 330-350 hours) and they felt that the more senior doctors were not representing their interests. They submitted a mass resignation letter, which was voided by the Labor court. They then submitted individual resignation letters which were to take effect on October 4. That date was postponed several times by the Labor court to today. Today, hundreds of young medical residents have resigned, despite an appeal from Prime Minister Netanyahu - who out of fear of the precedent it will set has tried to leave the matter to his surrogates - to delay their resignations for two weeks so that he may become involved.
According to Army Radio, a total of 260 residents did not show up for their morning shifts: 104 at Ichilov Hospital at Sourasky Medical Center, 71 at Meir Medical Center in Kfar Saba, 77 at Rambam Medical Center [out of 110 according to Israel Radio. CiJ] and eight at Bnai Zion Hospital.
Following the failure of the negotiations to produce a solution to the labor dispute, the sides had been expected to meet at the National Labor Court on Monday, where the state will likely request an injunction be issued against the resignations.
Thus far, the National Labor Court has declined to let residents resign over what they claim are unfair conditions agreed upon in the Israel Medical Association’s nine-year labor agreement with the employers, which was signed at the end of August.
After walking out on the talks with the Finance Ministry, the medical residents' representatives expressed frustration with the Treasury's "failure to understand the reality of the situation" and called on Netanyahu to intervene.
Without a compromise, all the sides have much to lose, as the physicians would not be given their jobs back once they carried out their threats to leave, and the Health Ministry desperately looked for other doctors to fill their places.
But there was a big surprise this morning. The government hospitals assumed that they could at least cover for the absence of the residents with senior doctors, but the senior doctors' union announced this morning that they would not cover. And just to sweeten the pie, the medical students announced that they will not start school on October 23 unless this is resolved. That would mean a delay in the readiness of the next rounds of medical residents to take their positions.
Doctors here are grossly underpaid. On the other hand, limiting services to emergency cases (and I'm not even sure there are enough doctors to provide those except in the short term) is likely to turn a lot more patients into emergency cases, or worse. Doctors shouldn't be on strike. They also shouldn't be treated like sanitation workers or baggage handlers.
Unfortunately, the real solution - getting the government out of the business of negotiating with the doctors and allowing the free market to work - cannot be implemented quickly enough. It's going to take a lot of goodwill - which is currently lacking - from all sides to make the system work.
Some of you might be wondering who the Minister of Health is. There isn't one. As I have mentioned once or twice before, ministries are handed out to political parties based on who needs to be in the coalition, and ministers don't necessarily know anything about the particular ministry in which they work. The Health Ministry is run by Deputy Minister Yaakov Litzman who - as part of the coalition agreement - has no minister above him (Litzman is from United Torah Judaism, which in principal takes only deputy ministries and the chairmanship of the Knesset Finance Committee). Would things be different if there were a medical professional in charge of the Health Ministry? Possibly, but I have my doubts. In any event, we have heard much less from Litzman in this crisis than we have from the doctors, the finance ministry and the Prime Minister's office.
So if you're in Israel, please try to stay healthy. And if you're a doctor living abroad who has dreamed of making aliya, this might be your time to try to cut a deal.
Here's a video that explains how and why 'Palestinians' come to Israeli hospitals rather than staying in 'Palestinian' hospitals in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, or going to hospitals in Jordan or Egypt.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
