(Tablet) Judith Miller - The Palestinian in the clinic at one of Israel's highest security prisons near Beersheba had a persistent pain in the back of his neck. He trembled and had trouble walking. Yuval Bitton, then a 28-year-old dentist, suspected that his patient might be suffering from an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, resulting from a life-threatening brain tumor. "He needs to be hospitalized, immediately," Bitton advised the prison doctors. The surgery took hours. The prisoner survived. The year was 2004. The patient was Yahya Sinwar, the Palestinian who in 2017 would become the leader of Hamas in Gaza and subsequently the mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack in Israel in which 1,200 mostly Israeli civilians died and 240 were taken hostage.
2024-03-20 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive