WHO slams inhumanity of "Israeli" travel bans on ill palestinians

Source: AFP, 02-04-2008
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AL-QUDS): The UN's World Health Organization (WHO) lashed out at 'Israel' on Tuesday for denying or delaying travel permits for critically ill Gaza Strip residents, saying the right to health appeared to be optional for Palestinians. Ambrogio Manenti, who heads the WHO's Occupied West Bank and Gaza office, said case studies of patients who died while waiting for permits to travel to 'Israel' for treatment "show nonsense, inhumanity and, at the end, tragedy."
"The right to health appears to be optional for Palestinians," he added.
The UN agency cited the case of Amir al-Yazji, 9, who died of meningal encephelitis at a hospital in Gaza in November after his family, faced one hurdle after another to get a travel permit only to have authorities deny the documents to the ambulance team at the last minute.
Tertiary healthcare is virtually unavailable in the Palestinian territories and a strict permit system limits access to hospitals in 'Israel', the report said.
The cases highlighted by the WHO study show critically ill patients and their families going through an often nightmarish process to obtain the permits, which in some cases are denied "for security reasons." The situation is particularly acute in Gaza, where 'Israel' has imposed a crippling blockade since June, in what the Jewish (Zionist) state says is an attempt to halt rocket fire.
The blockade has led to a sharp deterioration in access to health services, in what amounts to "collective punishment of the weakest," the report said.
Manenti said Yazji is a case in point. After the young boy was admitted to hospital on November 5, doctors ordered a computer-aided tomography. But the CT scanner needed repairs, something that couldn't be done until November 10 due to a shortage of parts resulting from the closure of Gaza.
After eventually finding a lesion on the anterior wall of the brain, doctors decided Amir needed specialist care in 'Israel'. The boy's father obtained an urgent referral, but for days he could not get a permit for his son to go through the Erez crossing into 'Israel' despite what he said were "hundreds of phone calls."
As Yazji's condition deteriorated dramatically, authorization eventually came through on November 18. But the doctor and two nurses who were to travel in the ambulance with the boy up to the crossing were denied access to Erez.
"Five different teams ... were refused," the report said.
After one team finally passed the 'Israeli' security checks, authorities gave the patient 15 minutes to get to Erez, but medical staff decided to wait until the next day since they needed one hour to ready the boy and the ambulance.
At 7:45 am on November 19, Yazji was dead.
That, says Manenti, was one of several "tragedies that could and should have been avoided."
Between October 1 and March 2, 32 patients died in Gaza after the permits they requested were delayed or refused, the WHO said.
The number of patients who were denied permits rose from just over 3 percent in January 2006 - when Hamas won Palestinian parliamentary elections - to almost 36 percent in December 2008.