Madison-Rafah Journal

Photo Credit: Rima Merriman, The Electronic Intifada, 29 May 2005

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Haaretz Editorial, 10 Jan 2008

The scene shown Tuesday night on television was one of the most harsh and shameful seen here in recent times: a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, Ahmed Samut from Khan Yunis, and a nine-and-a-half-year-old girl, Sausan Jaafari, of Rafah, as they entered the Erez crossing alone, after being torn from the arms of their weeping parents.

The two children have heart conditions and need urgent surgery to save their lives. Wolfson Medical Center in Holon agreed to care for them, as part of their Save a Child's Heart program that saves the lives of children around the world.

The hospital is to be praised for the project. The editors at Channel 10 News and reporter Shlomi Eldar are also to be praised. Israel and its security establishment, however, deserve a mark of disgrace.

The parents of the two children, both fathers and mothers, were not permitted by the Israel Defense Forces' coordination and liaison administration to accompany their children to the fateful surgery. They are "denied entry" to Israel. The fact that Sausan's parents had accompanied her to previous operations at Wolfson did not change the evil decree. It is indeed a decree of unparalleled evil. Only the elderly uncle of one of the children was allowed to go with them.

The images of children walking alone on their way to the frightening surgery should have reverberated from one end of the country to the other. They should have disturbed all Israelis, no matter what their political outlook. All parents in Israel should have put themselves in the place of those unfortunate parents.

Israel must not take inordinate pride in the very fact that it provides medical care for two sick children. In the state of siege it has imposed on Gaza, Israel bears heavy moral responsibility for the welfare and health of the besieged. It should also be noted that the siege is preventing Gaza's Shifa Hospital from expanding its departments as planned, due to lack of building materials in Gaza. But the decision not to allow parents to accompany their children, which is also made in many other cases in which patients are denied entry to Israel for life-saving treatments, is insufferable.

Israel is taking the name of security in vain. No security consideration can excuse closing the crossing to the sick children's parents, who are under no suspicion and who are not allowed in only because of their young age.

The security establishment has enough tools to make exceptions to the accepted practices that it has put in place arbitrarily, and to know how to filter out the humanitarian cases that must be allowed to cross. Sausan's and Ahmed's parents have the basic human right to nurse their children through their most difficult hours.

It is not too late. The security establishment should immediately allow the parents to enter Israel and ease its decrees in similar humanitarian cases. This is not about security, and it is not only about the fate of these families; it is about Israel's moral image. The image that came through on television Tuesday night raises some very doleful thoughts.