Ambassadors of Humanity
By Anat Meidan

Over the course of five months, the doctors and nurses of Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon treated Wania Suleiman, a resident of Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza.  After suffering a serious stroke, she lost consciousness during the 24th week of pregnancy.  Attempts at Azati Hospital to stabilize her condition proved unsuccessful and she was transferred to Barzilai.  At the end of September, after about ten weeks during which doctors fought for the lives of Wania and her fetus, she gave birth to her third son.

Last Wednesday, Suleiman passed away in the hospital’s internal medicine ward as the medical staff fought back tears.  Two days later, a Qassam rocket landed in Ashkelon, shaking the hospital building and raising the level of fear and anxiety of its occupants.  “We knew the Suleiman family on an intimate basis; we were happy when a healthy boy was born and saddened that his mother never got to see him.  When she died, our hearts ached,” said Dr. Yosef Mashil, head of the internal medicine department as he rushed off to care for a Gaza resident, about age 40, brought to Barzilai under artificial respiration.

About 25 Gaza residents are now hospitalized in Ashkelon.  They arrive at Barzilai after coordination between the Hospital Authority and the medical institutions in the Gaza Strip.  This dialogue goes on all the time—even when the Qassams thunder overhead.  No one produces a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to saving lives.  The battle to save lives is the sole determining factor, even as an interminable battle rages outside bent on destroying life.

Outside, war prevails, aimed at sowing hatred and death.  Inside, within the hospital walls, the fight is one for the lives of patients regardless of their national identification.  Were, God forbid, a Qassam rocket to fall on the hospital’s grounds, there would certainly be joy in Gaza over the staggering achievement.  It would not occur to anyone to think of the Gaza residents rehabilitating there.

It seems nightmarish and surrealistic, and some would say that it makes no sense, but the response at Barzilai is the only ethical answer to the surrounding chaos.  This model is the way to build humanistic relations between neighbors, humane and normal within a reality that is crazed, sick, and inhuman.

The small glimmer of hope amid the vast darkness is that the husband and children of Wania Suleiman, who was treated with unending devotion at Barzilai, and the families of the 25 Palestinians hospitalized here, will lower the level of hatred when they return home.  They, who met Israelis in white cloaks working to improve their quality of life, will perhaps be ambassadors of coexistence and of a dialogue of words rather than missiles.  Who knows better than they that this is the only alternative left to us.

This television show comes from Palestinian Authority TV programming for kids. Enough said.

1. Our responsibility to our servicemen is a supreme value in Israel. It stems from the moral foundations of the State of Israel and the Jewish faith. This is Israel’s true strength.

2. The Cabinet endorsed the prisoner exchange to send a message to IDF soldiers and their families – that Israel will always do everything in its power to bring its sons and daughters home. This, despite misgivings over the need to release a cold-blooded murderer, Samir Kuntar, whose brutality is celebrated by Arab extremists.

3. Israel aspired to reach a deal quickly and on the most favorable terms possible. Rejecting the current deal could have meant a lengthy delay and a more painful price tag.

4. The agreement will return Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to Israel, together with the additional remains of soldiers who fell during the Second Lebanon War and a report on the fate of Ron Arad. Israel will return Kuntar, four other Lebanese terrorists and the bodies of dozens of infiltrators and terrorists (including eight Hizbullah members) to Lebanon. Israel will also give the UN Secretary-General information on four missing Iranian diplomats and, after the exchange, release Palestinian prisoners – whose identity and number will be at Israel’s exclusive discretion.

5. The Government of Israel remains steadfast in its commitment to obtain reliable information on the fate of Ron Arad and to continue working for the release of Gilad Shalit. No effort will be spared to find them and the other MIAs and to bring them home.

6. Israel’s response to the abduction of Goldwasser and Regev was unprecedented – Hizbullah suffered a severe blow to its infrastructure, arsenals and operatives. Its leaders are still in hiding. Israel will respond with full force to any future attempts to abduct its soldiers and citizens.

7. Hizbullah, Hamas, and their fellow Iran-backed terrorists are responsible for the suffering of Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese. They are the obstacle to peace between Israel and its neighbors.

8. Israel expects the international community to take decisive action against extremists and to support Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens while it negotiates peace with pragmatic counterparts.

The World Should Know What He Did to My Family
By Smadar Haran Kaiser

Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page B02

NAHARIYA, Israel–Abu Abbas, the former head of a Palestinian terrorist group who was captured in Iraq on April 15, is infamous for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. But there are probably few who remember why Abbas’s terrorists held the ship and its 400-plus passengers hostage for two days. It was to gain the release of a Lebanese terrorist named Samir Kuntar, who is locked up in an Israeli prison for life. Kuntar’s name is all but unknown to the world. But I know it well. Because almost a quarter of a century ago, Kuntar murdered my family.

It was a murder of unimaginable cruelty, crueler even than the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was shot on the Achille Lauro and dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Kuntar’s mission against my family, which never made world headlines, was also masterminded by Abu Abbas. And my wish now is that this terrorist leader should be prosecuted in the United States, so that the world may know of all his terrorist acts, not the least of which is what he did to my family on April 22, 1979.

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border. Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer. As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat. They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The next day, Abu Abbas announced from Beirut that the terrorist attack in Nahariya had been carried out “to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty” at Camp David the previous year. Abbas seems to have a gift for charming journalists, but imagine the character of a man who protests an act of peace by committing an act of slaughter.

Two of Abbas’s terrorists had been killed by police on the beach. The other two were captured, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Despite my protests, one was released in a prisoner exchange for Israeli POWs several months before the Achille Lauro hijacking. Abu Abbas was determined to find a way to free Kuntar as well. So he engineered the hijacking of the Achille Lauro off the coast of Egypt and demanded the release of 50 Arab terrorists from Israeli jails. The only one of those prisoners actually named was Samir Kuntar. The plight of hundreds held hostage on a cruise ship for two days at sea lent itself to massive international media coverage. The attack on Nahariya, by contrast, had taken less than an hour in the middle of the night. So what happened then was hardly noticed outside of Israel.

One hears the terrorists and their excusers say that they are driven to kill out of desperation. But there is always a choice. Even when you have suffered, you can choose whether to kill and ruin another’s life, or whether to go on and rebuild. Even after my family was murdered, I never dreamed of taking revenge on any Arab. But I am determined that Samir Kuntar should never be released from prison. In 1984, I had to fight my own government not to release him as part of an exchange for several Israeli soldiers who were POWs in Lebanon. I understood, of course, that the families of those POWs would gladly have agreed to the release of an Arab terrorist to get their sons back. But I told Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, that the blood of my family was as red as that of the POWs. Israel had always taken a position of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. If they were going to make an exception, let it be for a terrorist who was not as cruel as Kuntar. “Your job is not to be emotional,” I told Rabin, “but to act rationally.” And he did.

So Kuntar remains in prison. I have been shocked to learn that he has married an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of terrorist prisoners. As the wife of a prisoner, she gets a monthly stipend from the government. I’m not too happy about that.

In recent years, Abu Abbas started telling journalists that he had renounced terrorism and that killing Leon Klinghoffer had been a mistake. But he has never said that killing my family was a mistake. He was a terrorist once, and a terrorist, I believe, he remains. Why else did he spend these last years, as the Israeli press has reported, free as a bird in Baghdad, passing rewards of $25,000 from Saddam Hussein to families of Palestinian suicide bombers? More than words, that kind of cash prize, which is a fortune to poor families, was a way of urging more suicide bombers. The fortunate thing about Abbas’s attaching himself to Hussein is that it set him up for capture.

Some say that Italy should have first crack at Abbas. It had already convicted him of the Achille Lauro hijacking in absentia in 1986. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi now wants Abbas handed over so that he can begin serving his life sentence. But it’s also true that in 1985, the Italians had Abbas in their hands after U.S. fighter jets forced his plane to land in Sicily. And yet they let him go. So while I trust Berlusconi, who knows if a future Italian government might not again wash its hands of Abbas?

In 1995, Rabin, then our prime minister, asked me to join him on his trip to the White House, where he was to sign a peace agreement with Yasser Arafat, which I supported. I believe that he wanted me to represent all Israeli victims of terrorism. Rabin dreaded shaking hands with Arafat, knowing that those hands were bloody. At first, I agreed to make the trip, but at the last minute, I declined. As prime minister, Rabin had to shake hands with Arafat for political reasons. As a private person, I did not. So I stayed here.

Now I am ready and willing to come to the United States to testify against Abu Abbas if he is tried for terrorism. The daughters of Leon Klinghoffer have said they are ready to do the same. Unlike Klinghoffer, Danny, Einat and Yael were not American citizens. But Klinghoffer was killed on an Italian ship in Abbas’s attempt to free the killer of my family in Israel. We are all connected by the international web of terrorism woven by Abbas. Let the truth come out in a new and public trial. And let it be in the United States, the leader in the struggle against terrorism.
Smadar Haran Kaiser is a social worker. She is remarried and has two daughters.

• The institution of “calm” applies only to the Gaza Strip and not to West Bank areas.  Thus, while Israel’s security forces will refrain from operations in the Gaza Strip, they will continue to undertake necessary operations in the West Bank.
• Palestinian terrorist organizations must:
  • Halt all fire and terrorist activity
  • End their buildup of arms
  • Cease smuggling from Egypt
• While the above points are effective immediately with the beginning of the “calm,” opening the crossings to Gaza will be implemented gradually after successive periods of calm.
  • After 3 days, Israel will open the Karni and Sufa crossings for basic commodities
  • One week later, Israel will allow for a larger number of commodities to enter the Gaza Strip, excepting those used for weapons manufacturing
  • After an additional week, talks will be held about opening the Rafah crossing to Egypt
• The freedom of Gilad Shalit, kidnapped two years ago, is an integral part of the “state of calm.”  According to Foreign Minister Livni, releasing Shalit is a necessary step if Hamas wants to achieve further gains.
• Furthermore, Israel will continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure that all parties adhere to their obligations.  Hamas will bear responsibility for any terrorist act by any organization and should be prepared to accept the consequences of such actions.

While the State of Israel has every desire to see this “lull” develop into a period of sustained calm, she places primary significance on the safety and security of her citizens.  Should the “calm” collapse, Israel will take alternate measures to address the new situation. 

For more informaiton, see the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Hamas has recently increased its mortar fire from the Gaza Strip as it continued to indescriminately attack Israeli civilians living in the Western Negev.

The Hamas organization is staging a situation of crisis and distress, and harming the civilian population in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to divert pressure onto Israel.
Colonel Nir Press, Head of the Coordination and Liaison Administration: “The State of Israel has permitted the steady and continuous flow of fuel into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks.”

2,200,000 liters of diesel fuel are transferred through the Nahal Oz fuel terminal to the Gaza Strip power plant weekly. This power plant is capable of supplying 30% of the total electricity requirements of the Gaza Strip. The remaining power needs are supplied by Israel and Egypt. In addition, unlimited quantities of cooking gas, 800,000 liters of diesel fuel for transportation and 75,000 liters of gasoline are transferred weekly.

The gasoline and diesel fuel transferred by Israel is designated primarily for use by ambulances, water pumps, the sewage system, for the operation of generators at various institutions such as hospitals, schools and clinics, for agricultural use, transportation, school buses, food trucks, garbage collection, public transportation, shipping boats, food plants, bakeries, and so on.

Col. Press stated that it has become apparent in recent weeks that the Palestinians are staging an energy crisis while instigating a strike and protest rallies. The closed filling stations, the long lines of people and vehicles waiting many hours to fill their tanks, are all part of a planned Hamas media campaign being conducted at the expense of the civilian population – a crisis caused by their failure to draw available fuel supplies from the Nahal Oz Palestinian fuel depot.

Col. Press further stated that “In the last two weeks there were no restrictions on freely drawing fuel from the Palestinian depot at Nahal Oz and distributing it to filling stations, but this did not take place. In contrast, cooking gas and diesel fuel for the power station have been supplied on a regular basis. As of today, the Palestinian stock of fuel amounts to 188,000 liters of gasoline and over 800,000 liters of diesel fuel.”

The Hamas organization is intentionally harming the civilian population in the Gaza Strip by not allowing the supply of fuel for humanitarian purposes, and preventing the distribution of fuel to civilian filling stations. In the weeks preceding this development, a substantial share of the fuel supplies – almost half – was diverted for use by the Hamas terror organization and its operatives.

The murderous attack on 9 April 2008 at the Nahal Oz fuel terminal, in which two civilian workers at the terminal, Oleg Lipson and Lev Cherniak, were killed, constitutes additional testimony to the terror from the Gaza Strip directed at Israel, at the crossings which serve the Palestinians, and at Israeli civilians working for Palestinian welfare, while attempting to create a crisis and to harness Palestinian public opinion against Israel as part of this campaign.

The cynical use of the Palestinian population, as well as the stoppage of the supply of fuel for civilian and humanitarian use, could have been prevented by drawing the available fuel from the depot at the Palestinian terminal and directing it to humanitarian/civilian needs and to local filling stations, for the benefit of the residents of Gaza.

See here for the full study by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Today’s students will be the leaders of tomorrow; the fact that they’re learning to view Israel and the United States with a measure of loathing and hatred makes us wonder what the region will look like in the future.  We can only hope that the state of education changes soon.

At the end of February, a Palestinian woman from Beit Lahiya gave birth to twins at the Barzilai Medical Centre in Ashkelon. The twins, born prematurely, weighed less than 1.5 kgs each. They were admitted to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where they were treated by the medical team.

The first Hamas missiles began raining down on Ashkelon on Saturday (1 March) shortly after 5 a.m. When the Hamas shelling of Ashkelon started, the twins, a boy and girl, were still in the NICU. One of the Grad rockets fell a mere 50 meters from the hospital entrance. All the premature babies in the NICU unit, including the two Palestinian babies, were transferred to the hospital’s bomb shelter for fear that the hospital itself would receive a direct missile hit.

Ashkelon Hospital, established in 1961, and renamed the Barzilai Medical Center ten years later, serves the area stretching from Ashdod in the north to Sderot in the south and Kiryat Gat in the east.

* * *

Update: Iman Shefi, mother of the twins born in Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital in the midst of the Hamas rocket attack on the south two weeks ago, was interviewed by “Yediot Aharonot” reporter Matan Tzuri (11 Mar 2008):

Iman Shefi, a resident of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, was beside herself as she watched the trail of smoke left by three Grad rockets launched near her home towards Ashkelon. “I was petrified,” she said. “I was scared that the rockets would hit the Ashkelon hospital where my two babies are.”

Several months ago, Iman learnt she was pregnant with triplets. The first baby, born at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, died during labor. The Palestinian doctors decided to transfer Iman immediately to an Israeli hospital to give birth to the two remaining babies. The twins, Faisal, a boy, and Bian, a girl, were delivered by Caesarean section at the Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon. They operation was successful, and the twins were admitted to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, which was moved to an air-raid shelter during the attacks.

After delivering the babies, the parents had to return home to Gaza, where they found themselves in the line of fire. “The Islamic Jihad takes the malfunctioning Hamas rockets, repairs them, and launches them at Israel. They do not always reach Israel, and they fall on us,” Shefi said. “Last Tuesday three Kassam rockets fell close to my house. They hit small children and old people.”

Only on Monday (10 March), two weeks after giving birth in the midst of the rocket attacks on the south, was Shefi able to return to Ashkelon to visit her babies. Overcome with emotion, she thanked the doctors and nurses for their devoted care to her infant twins.

She said, “I dream that my children will not have to go through what I have had to, that they will grow up in an era of peace. I pray that the residents of Sderot will not be angry with us. I sympathize with their suffering and don’t want them to be harmed, but we are victims as well. We have no control over the Hamas. They do as they please, in contradiction of the Quran. I do not want the Hamas in power, but I am not sure that Abu Mazen can stop the shooting.”