Israeli hospital saves Gazan child using a stem-cell transplant

It’s not widely known that Israeli hospitals will treat any Palestinian who’s sick or injured, given that a few conditions are met. First, the patient must not be a terrorist, though children of terrorists will be and have been treated so long as they’re accompanied by a relative (mother or grandparent) who is not suspected of terrorism.

Further, the patient must have a condition that is not treatable in a Palestinian hospital.  Finally, the patient must have permission from the Palestinian Authority (PA) to go to an Israeli hospital (the PA is supposed to cover the expenses but often doesn’t), and, if the patient is from Gaza, permission from the Gazan authorities.  Since the PA sometimes doesn’t pay up, often the treatment winds up being free, which means it’s paid for by Israel.

This has been going on forever, and yet it’s rarely publicized.  If Israel is an “apartheid state”—even with respect to Palestinians—this treatment wouldn’t be dispensed. It is, pure and simple, a case of humanitarianism and altruism.  And remember, this is not a one-off: it happens all the time.  It involves the Israelis helping people regarded as their antagonists, but they do it anyway, for they value life.  Remember that when you hear that the IDF is deliberately killing civilians for the sake of taking life.

How many people are treated in this way? The American Journal of Public Health answers this in a 2018 article:

Undoubtedly, the short- and long-term suffering of an ill Palestinian delayed at a checkpoint is always unfortunate, and occasionally even tragic. [JAC: delays for sick people passing through checkpoints into Israel sometimes occur to allow ambulances and the like to be checked for terrorists, bombs, or weapons, which have been found in ambulances and other vehicles.] However, despite ongoing terror threats, and even during unrest and wars, many Palestinians do pass daily into Israel for medical care. Israeli hospitals have long provided Palestinians with extensive medical services. For example, during the research period (in 2005 alone), approximately 123,000 Palestinians were treated at just one institution, Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, which included 15000 admissions as well as 32,000 visits to the emergency department.

In general, special entry permits are issued in humanitarian cases for ill people, their chaperones, and for Palestinian medical teams. For example, more recently, in 2016, 93,890 such authorizations were issued for patients (plus 100,722 for accompanying family) to be treated at hospitals throughout Israel. At the two West Jerusalem Hadassah hospitals alone, 15,743 patients, comprising more than one third of the total, came through checkpoints and were cared for there. Another 16% (6,577 patients) crossed into Israel and were treated in hospitals in East Jerusalem.

During the same year, 9,832 Palestinian children with birth defects and chronic diseases were treated in Israeli hospitals. During the first half of 2017, 46,132 such permits have been issued and a further 2,163 authorized Palestinian medical personnel to work or be trained in Israel or East Jerusalem (written personal communication, October 4, 2017, Ido D. Dechtman and Yuval Ran, Medical Corps, Tel Aviv, Israel Defense Forces). Another noteworthy example of Israeli compassion for the suffering of her Arab neighbors is the treatment of more than 4,000 victims of the Syrian Civil War in civilian hospitals at Israeli government expense.

Do people realize this? If they do, do they even care, or do they manage to write it off as some kind of “sickwashing”?  I find it a heartening example of humans at their finest.

So here’s the story of one Gazan child whose life was saved by a complex procedure in an Israeli hospital. This is a report from the Elder of Ziyon site.

Click to read; I’ve reproduced the whole short post below:

There’s an intro from the EoZ, and then the details from the Sheba Medical Center (further indented). Bolding comes from the EoZ’s post:

I received this from Sheba Medical Center:

Among Sheba’s values are “peace through health” – treating all patients from the region and Middle East and seeing healthcare as a path to peaceful coexistence.

At the outbreak of the war there were sixty-one Palestinian patients being treated at Sheba and housed on the campus with sixty-eight family members.

Sheba has continued to receive Palestinian patients from the West Bank throughout the war, as well as providing food, shelter and any needed treatments to the forty families from Gaza that were being treated at Sheba and cannot return at this point.

One story in particular is stunning.

W—–, who has asked that her identity and photo be obscured, came to Sheba from Gaza, with a toddler son S—- who has a serious and fatal immune system deficiency disorder. What was needed was a stem cell transplant, but he had no bone marrow match with his younger brother or other family members.

Sheba staff told W—- and her husband that if she had another baby, there was a possibility that child could be a match and a donor. They decided to try. She became pregnant and a test revealed that the fetus would indeed be a match for her sick son. So, Sheba put them up on the campus and treated her for the duration of her pregnancy and delivery.

The baby boy, G——, was born on Oct. 17.

While Sheba was receiving a flood of those injured and traumatized by the war, and with 200 doctors and nurses mobilized into the army, they proceeded with taking extraordinary steps to save the life of one Palestinian child.

The newborn’s cord blood was sufficient for the needed stem cell transplant. The procedure has been performed and the now-four-year-old son is expected to regain full health and live a normal life. When it is possible to do so, his family will return to Gaza with him and his new baby brother.

Hamas fired machine guns into cribs and then raped the mothers of the babies before murdering them, and Sheba is going to great lengths to save the life of a single toddler from Gaza.

You unfortunately will not read this story anywhere else. But our values will continue to define us, and we will continue to hold them high.

I wanted to reproduce this in the hopes of showing the humanitarian of Israelis, which in cases like this I consider both tear-inducing and reassuring. But it also shows what humans of any nationality are capable of if they can set aside fear and hatred of The Other.