Israel Eases Closure of Palestinian Territories

Faced with rapidly deteriorating economic and health care conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel took steps Sunday to slightly ease the strict closure it imposed March 3 after a rash of suicide bombings.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres told his Cabinet that Palestinians may return to their jobs in Jewish settlements in the territories and that Palestinian patients will be allowed to seek treatment in Israeli hospitals.

But all but a few Palestinians will be barred from their jobs in Israel indefinitely, he said, because Israel’s security forces are still receiving frequent reports of planned terrorist attacks.

Israel was the main source of employment for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians before the borders were sealed, with about 60,000 Palestinians working legally in the Jewish state.

But the closure has proved so popular with Israelis that Peres’ Labor Party has decided to make separation between Israel and the territories a main theme of its campaign for May 29 elections, newspapers here said Sunday.

Peres reportedly prefers portraying the current closure as temporary. But Interior Minister Haim Ramon, who is in charge of Labor’s campaign, is pressing the party to promise voters that the closure will be made permanent.

Israel is asking other nations to contribute to a fund that will create jobs in the territories for Palestinians, and the government has authorized permits for 100,000 foreign workers to replace Palestinians inside Israel.

Touring the Karni checkpoint between the Gaza Strip and Israel on Sunday, Deputy Defense Minister Ori Orr said that goods--but not people--will now be allowed to pass into and out of the territories.

Human rights groups and physicians have charged that the closure has seriously damaged the Palestinian health care system and endangered the lives of some patients.

“The situation of health care in the territories is chaotic,” said Dr. Amin Thalji, director of Al Makassed, the largest and best-equipped hospital serving Palestinians. Thalji said his hospital has been virtually paralyzed by the border closure.

At Al Makassed, a 250-bed facility in East Jerusalem, about two-thirds of the staff, or 400 employees, commute from the West Bank in normal times, Thalji said. But until recently, doctors, nurses, technicians and other health care workers were kept away under the ban.

“This has deprived thousands of Palestinians of badly needed services,” Thalji said. He said the hospital has been forced to cancel scheduled surgeries, close its outpatient clinics and suspend its physician training program. “It is like canceling a hospital,” he said.

Two Israeli rights groups, Physicians for Human Rights and the Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel, joined with Al Makassed last week in petitioning Israel’s High Court of Justice to allow health care workers from the territories to return to their jobs inside Israel. The court gave the army 45 days to devise a plan that would permit at least some health care workers to do so.

In the meantime, Thalji said, the army agreed to immediately ease some restrictions: On Sunday, 22 of Al Makassed’s staff from the West Bank received permits to go to work, with 223 others expected to join them throughout the week.

The ban has also prevented most Palestinian patients from seeking care inside Israel.

“In the past three weeks, there were 100 referrals by Palestinian physicians in the West Bank and Gaza of patients to Israeli hospitals. Of those referrals, only 10 were allowed in,” said Hadas Ziv, a spokeswoman for the Tel Aviv-based Physicians for Human Rights.

Initially, the closure was so strict that medical supplies were not being delivered to hospitals and essential drugs and equipment began running low, Ziv said. Gradually, that restriction was eased.

“This closure is the most extreme one ever imposed,” said Dr. Ruchama Marton, a psychiatrist who is chairwoman of Physicians for Human Rights. Marton said about 250 Israeli physicians are volunteers in the organization.

But Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli military administration in the territories, said that human rights groups and Palestinian officials have exaggerated the hardships imposed by the closure.

Dror insisted that any patient who truly needed treatment in Israel, and could find no alternative in the territories, has been granted entry. He denied claims by Palestinian officials that as many as seven patients died en route to care because their ambulances were delayed at army checkpoints.

Emergency vehicles are reportedly stopped and searched because several months ago a bomber posing as a patient rode into Israel in a Palestinian ambulance.

“If there are delays, they are short,” Dror said, “and they are due to the fact that there is a closure and that we don’t want any Palestinian to come into the area under Israeli control.”

Dror said the government is now allowing regular deliveries of food to the Gaza Strip and West Bank and is also allowing textiles and other products to leave the territories for shipment from Israeli ports.