{"id":39713,"date":"2019-06-12T12:23:20","date_gmt":"2019-06-12T12:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=39713"},"modified":"2019-06-12T12:23:20","modified_gmt":"2019-06-12T12:23:20","slug":"gaza-parents-struggle-to-join-kids-for-treatment-in-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=39713","title":{"rendered":"Gaza parents struggle to join kids for treatment in Israel"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nJERUSALEM: When Palestinian preschooler Aisha a-Lulu came out of brain surgery in a strange Jerusalem hospital room, she called out for her mother and father. She repeated the cry over and over, but her parents never came.
Instead of a family member, Israeli authorities had approved a stranger to escort Aisha from the blockaded Gaza Strip to the east Jerusalem hospital. As her condition deteriorated, the child was returned to Gaza unconscious. One week later, she was dead.
A photo of Aisha smiling softly in her hospital bed, brown curls swaddled in bandages, drew an outpouring on social media. The wrenching details of her last days have shined a light on Israel\u2019s vastly complex and stringent system for issuing Gaza exit permits.
It is a bureaucracy that has Israeli and Palestinian authorities blaming each other for its shortfalls, while inflicting a heavy toll on Gaza\u2019s sick children and their parents.
\u201cThe most difficult thing is to leave your child in the unknown,\u201d said Waseem a-Lulu, Aisha\u2019s father. \u201cJerusalem is just an hour away, but it feels as though it is another planet.\u201d
So far this year, roughly half of applications for patient companion permits were rejected or left unanswered by Israel, according to the World Health Organization. That has forced over 600 patients, including some dozen children under 18, to make the trek out of the territory alone or without close family by their side.
The system stems from the Hamas militant group\u2019s takeover of Gaza in 2007, when it violently ousted the Western-backed Palestinian Authority. Israel and Egypt responded by imposing a blockade that tightly restricted movement in and out of Gaza.
The blockade, which Israel says is necessary to prevent Hamas from arming, has precipitated a financial and humanitarian crisis in the enclave. For years, Gaza\u2019s 2 million residents have endured rising poverty and unemployment, undrinkable groundwater and frequent electricity outages. Public hospitals wrestle with chronic shortages of drugs and basic medical equipment. Israel blames Hamas, which it considers a terrorist group, for the crisis.
In what it portrays as a humanitarian gesture to help Gaza\u2019s civilians, Israel permits Palestinian patients to seek medical treatment at hospitals in Israel and the West Bank once they pass a series of bureaucratic hurdles. COGAT, the Israeli defense body that issues the permits, says it insists that all patients cross with an escort, usually a close relative, unless they wish to go alone or require immediate treatment that doesn\u2019t allow time for security screening.
In order to get a permit, patients must first submit a diagnosis to the West Bank-based Palestinian Health Ministry, proving that their treatment isn\u2019t available in Gaza. Then a Palestinian liaison requests exit permits from COGAT, which reviews the applications and passes them to Israel\u2019s Shin Bet security agency for background checks.
According to WHO, the approval rate has plummeted in recent years.
It said that in 2012, Israel allowed in 93 percent of patients and 83 percent of their companions for treatment. For the month of April 2019, the figure stands at just 65 percent of patients and 52 percent of their companions.
A COGAT official disputed the figures, saying they don\u2019t take into account that the number of permit applications has grown as Gaza\u2019s health care system deteriorates, and that Israel has started issuing permits less regularly but for prolonged stays. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity under agency rules, said COGAT is working to ease restrictions by designating a permit specifically for parents of child patients.
After being diagnosed with brain cancer, Aisha received immediate approval to get out of Gaza for what was hoped to be life-saving surgery. But when her parents approached the Palestinian Civil Affairs Commission for escort permits, their process ground to a halt.
To their bewilderment, Palestinian officials told them not to apply, saying it was too risky.
At 37, Waseem is below the age that Israel deems acceptable for swift entry on security grounds. Today, all men under 55 require extra screening, which means waiting, usually for months, according to Mor Efrat, the Gaza and West Bank director for Physicians for Human Rights Israel. As for Aisha\u2019s mother, Muna, a quirk of her upbringing in Egypt left her without an official Israeli-issued ID card required to receive a permit.
\u201cWe tell families to find a companion that won\u2019t give Israel any reason to refuse,\u201d said Osama Najar, spokesman for the Palestinian Health Ministry. \u201cWe want to save the child and, yes, that can mean sending them alone.\u201d
In this sense, the Palestinian Authority \u201cacts as a subcontractor for Israel,\u201d said Efrat, forcing parents to make a difficult choice: delay their child\u2019s urgent care, or search for someone else that Israel would be more likely to let cross.
Aisha\u2019s parents said they scoured for alternatives, applying for an aunt and her 75-year-old grandmother, but Israel rejected both.
The girl\u2019s only remaining hope, the Palestinian office told them, was to apply for as many older women as possible from their extended social network. A permit for Halima Al-Ades, a remote family acquaintance whom Aisha had never met, was approved.
Muna said she had no choice but to sign COGAT\u2019s consent form and whisk her daughter out of Gaza for immediate treatment. She said the frustration of the sprawling bureaucracy, and the painful memory of her 5-year-old daughter crying for her on the phone during her last days, haunts her.
\u201cIt was the hardest time of my life,\u201d she said. \u201cMy heart was being ripped out every day and every hour.\u201d
Aisha\u2019s doctor in Jerusalem, Ahmad Khandaqji, said he has treated countless lone patients from Gaza over the past year, but that Aisha\u2019s story stuck with him. \u201cShe felt abandoned and betrayed,\u201d he said. \u201cWe saw how that directly impacted her recovery.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JERUSALEM: When Palestinian preschooler Aisha a-Lulu came out of brain surgery in a strange Jerusalem hospital room, she called out for her mother and father. She repeated the cry over and over, but her parents never came.Instead of a family member, Israeli authorities had approved a stranger to escort Aisha from the blockaded Gaza Strip…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":39714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}