Middle East: Israel's secret police pressuring sick Gazans to spy for them, says report
Physicians for Human Rights claim that the Israelis are pressuring Palestinians to spy for them as a precondition to allowing them to receive medical treatment.
Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, have been interrogating Palestinians seeking permission to travel to Israel for crucial medical treatment and demanding that they spy for Israel. Refusal to do so means that treatment is denied.
Typically, patients are taken to a small, windowless room, underground, beneath the security terminal at Erez, the only passenger crossing that remains open between Gaza and Israel, where they are questioned by Shin Bet agents for hours, the report says.Requests for treatment in Israel have jumped since Israel imposed it's blockade on Gaza once the area had been taken over by Hamas, so the Palestinians in Gaza are particularly vulnerable. And the Palestinian Authority pay for any treatment which the Israelis give to Palestinians, so there is no financial excuse for Israel's behaviour. And yet, we are being told that Palestinians who refuse to co-operate with Shin Bet are simply refused treatment when Shin Bet must realise that any Palestinian caught helping them would face a death sentence.
Refusal to cooperate often results in the denial of medical treatment. Based on the testimonies of more than 30 Palestinians - 11 of which are published - the report says the Shin Bet is using coercion and extortion to force patients to collaborate.
"They took me through underground passages and made me sit in another waiting room for almost 45 minutes. A man approached me and called me to another room for interrogation. He asked me to sit down and presented himself as Moshe," Bassam al-Wahidi, a Fatah-aligned journalist, said in his affidavit to Physicians for Human Rights.
"After all my responses he said to me: 'I want to talk to you openly when you return from Israel so that you will have an acceptable reputation on the Israeli side. Either you make contact with me and agree to my demands, or you will not get any medical treatment which will cause you to be blind and you will become a burden to your family and friends,'" Wahidi said in his affidavit.
But he said he refused and was forced to return to Gaza without receiving any treatment. Now the 28-year-old, who married a year and a half ago, is completely blind in his right eye and losing the vision in his overstrained left eye.
International law forbids the use of civilians in conflict to damage an enemy state, so the Israelis must be aware that what they are doing is a clear violation.
Colonel Shlomi Muchtar has it right. The Israelis may have withdrawn from Gaza, but there is still no state of Palestine which the world recognises in the Gaza Strip and Israel still controls access to the area and much of the water and power supplies. Israel remains the official occupier and, as such, has responsibilities for the health and safety of the people that she occupies.Israel's security services insists that patients are denied entry only on security grounds. It also says that holding Israel responsible for the health of Palestinians in Gaza is "wholly inappropriate and misleading", arguing that it no longer occupies the coastal territory, having withdrawn its troops and settlers from the area in 2005.
However, in a letter to Physicians for Human Rights in June, Colonel Shlomi Muchtar said: "The state's obligations are derived, among other things, from the rules of war and from the scope of its control over border crossings between it and the Gaza Strip."
To make that health and safety reliant on whether or not the patient is prepared to spy for Shin Bet is breaking every humanitarian ethic that I can think of.
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