Road to Aid Means Evading Israeli Army

This tidy, modest village savored a small victory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this week when a white van climbed a steep dirt road from the Dilib Valley and, with unexpected ease, entered the community and found the yellow schoolhouse.

“Praise to Allah for sending them!” Fatma Hassan, a 75-year-old diabetic, exclaimed after the mosque’s loudspeaker announced that a Palestinian medical team, on its third try, had slipped through an Israeli army blockade and would be in the village all morning.

What happened next revealed that 350 of the village’s 2,000 people were ill and needed medicine. They jammed makeshift clinics in school classrooms, jostling for places in line and resorting at one point to shouting and shoving.

The urgency was understandable. Derkadis has no resident doctor or nurse, and none had been able to reach the village in more than a month.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s crackdown on an armed Palestinian uprising has created a growing health hazard, according to Palestinian medical officials, European relief workers and Israeli researchers.

Israeli army blockades around scores of Palestinian communities, they say, routinely detain or turn back ambulances racing to pick up or transport wounded or critically ill patients, several of whom have died during the wait for emergency care.

By keeping doctors and nurses from their rural rounds, the 3-month-old siege has also left many villages, such as this one, with dwindling supplies of medicine and no medical care. The Palestinian Authority’s Health Ministry says it has suspended polio, measles and tetanus vaccinations for 500,000 children.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, in a report Thursday, branded the sweeping travel restrictions “a clear form of collective punishment” that violates international law by curtailing about 3 million Palestinians’ access to health care.

On Thursday, in response to a U.S.-backed plan to quell violence and restart high-level talks on President Clinton’s Mideast peace proposal, Israel began easing the restrictions for the first time since late December.

It lifted blockades of two West Bank towns, Kalkilya and Janin; removed a barrier that had cut Gaza’s main north-south road; reopened two cargo crossings between Gaza and Israel; and again allowed travel from the West Bank to Jordan and from Gaza to Egypt. Gaza International Airport was to resume flights today.

Limited Easing of Travel Restrictions

These steps, however, are limited and tentative. Israeli security officials, in talks with Palestinian counterparts late Wednesday, said the siege would be fully lifted only if Palestinian gunmen, bombers and stone-throwing rioters curtail their attacks, which began Sept. 28. Three previous Israeli relaxations during the uprising were quickly reversed after new upsurges in fighting.

Most of the West Bank and Gaza remain under what both sides call “closure.”

The army defends the lock-down as a necessary security tool. It says it must take drastic steps to keep weapons and potential terrorists out of Israel and to prevent attacks on Jewish settlers in the territories.

Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowitz, an army spokesman, says Israel’s policy is to let Palestinian doctors and ambulances pass the roadblocks as long as they are aiding “innocent people.” In at least one case, he says, a Palestinian ambulance was caught transporting armaments.

But Israeli soldiers make their own policy, medical workers say, and routinely subject ambulances to searches of 20 minutes or more at each checkpoint. The delays can turn a half-hour trip between a village and the nearest hospital into a three-hour obstacle course.

“The attitude is very positive at the top and often quite negative on the ground,” said Ola Skuterud of Norway, who heads the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in the Palestinian territories. “The soldiers don’t care that much about international law. They react emotionally, sometimes under the pressure of conflict.”

“To them, we’re ordinary Palestinians, suspects,” said Dr. Wael Kadan, chief of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society’s emergency service, who denies that his 65 ambulances have ferried weapons. “The Israelis don’t respect our flashing red light. They throw our medicine on the ground. They shoot out our tires. And all the while, people are crying on the phone demanding to know why the ambulance hasn’t arrived.”

In cases reported by B’Tselem and Kadan, a 10-year-old girl died of a burst appendix, a 64-year-old man died of a heart attack and a 37-year-old man died of kidney failure in the West Bank in October after soldiers prevented them from getting to hospitals.

Doctor Alleges Delay of Ambulances

At least 306 Palestinians have been killed in clashes in the West Bank and Gaza during the uprising. Kadan says at least 15 of them bled to death during long-delayed ambulance rides. Two Palestinian medical workers shot while aiding the wounded also are among the dead.

At a growing number of roadblocks, there is no authority to decide which sick person may get past. The Israelis have been cutting off Palestinian communities with unstaffed roadblocks--yawning trenches or mounds of dirt and concrete that are sometimes mined.

Muaed Mezyed, 2, got a full sampling of roadblock types Wednesday after accidentally guzzling kerosene from a water bottle at home in Sinjel, a village that’s normally 15 minutes by car from the West Bank’s biggest hospital, in Ramallah.

As he raced with his son toward Ramallah in a private car, Nasser Mezyed first confronted unrelenting soldiers, then an impassible pile of sand. Next he got stuck in a long traffic bottleneck at a second unstaffed roadblock, through which motorists had carved a narrow passage.

With one of Kadan’s ambulances awaiting him on the other side, Mezyed carried the boy through the passage on foot and handed him to medical technician Diana Hussein, who inserted an intravenous drip in his arm.

Talal abu Eideh, the ambulance driver, leaned on his horn in lieu of a siren down the frantic home stretch. Listless and whimpering, the dark-haired toddler reached the hospital safely--1 hour and 50 minutes after leaving home.

Such journeys are familiar to the ailing villagers of Derkadis, who have walked several miles over the barren, rocky landscape to get past the checkpoints and hitch a ride into Ramallah, 11 miles to the east.

But many find the trek too arduous. Until this week, they had given up on doctors.

Those Who Need Care Learn to Make Do

For Bilal Izat, 40, that meant cleansing his failed kidney every other day with an old dialysis contraption at home and skipping the weekly hormone shots that he’s supposed to get in Ramallah. Izat, who looks closer to 60, complains of feeling dizzy and weak.

For Nura Akhem, 39, it meant forgoing treatment for her two boys, ages 4 and 2, when they broke out with chickenpox two weeks ago. Her husband lost his construction job in Israel because of the closure, and she has sold her jewelry to buy milk for her 14-month-old.

And for Zurah Tarek, 30, it meant fretting over her 5-year-old daughter’s urinary infection after the army twice turned her back at roadblocks on the way to the hospital in Ramallah.

“We’re angry, tense and depressed here,” Tarek told the doctors who showed up in the white van this week. “We need you here, but more than that we need peace so we can be free to come and go.”

Mohammed Iskafi, one of eight doctors, nurses and technicians from the privately funded Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees who organized the clinic here and dispensed free medication, wrote down for Tarek the name and phone number of a urologist in Ramallah.

Then he gave her something equally valuable--a hand-drawn map of the evasive, roundabout route the white van had taken to get here. Reverse the direction over an arc of back roads, he told her, and with luck you will make it to Ramallah.