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How Hamas Exploits Israel's Humanitarian Efforts

(Israel Hayom) David M. Weinberg - Two Gazan women headed to Jerusalem for cancer treatment were caught smuggling explosives into Israel for Hamas last week. Last month, Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan revealed that Hamas was using Gazan cancer patients to smuggle money and gold into Israel to finance terror operations. In 2005, Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, 21, from Gaza, was caught with 10 kg. of explosives in her underwear, en route to blow up Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba where she was being treated for burns. Despite the security risk, Israel allows tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave Gaza every year for medical treatment in Israel. For a decade, I served as a public affairs and development officer at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer hospital. At any given time, a quarter of all patients in that institution's Edmond and Lily Safra Children's Hospital are Arabs from Gaza. Doctors and administrators at Sheba and other Israeli hospitals offer similar care to Palestinians from the West Bank, to Syrian refugees, and, quietly, to Arabs from across the Middle East. Several years ago, a Palestinian child at Sheba was ill with a rare form of cancer and was clearly going to die without a bone marrow transplant. The doctors found an 18-year-old brother who was an almost perfect bone marrow match, but he was a Hamas activist with ties to known terrorist operatives. Doctors at the hospital successfully petitioned the Defense Ministry to grant special dispensation to allow him into Israel to save his little brother's life. Just before the brother was due to donate the bone marrow, he was taken into custody by security officials. The Israel Security Agency heard him giving instructions on his cell phone to his Hamas handlers in Gaza on how to get past the security at Sheba Medical Center and blow the place up. (In the end, the bone marrow was taken and the child's life was saved.) The writer is director of public affairs at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
2017-04-26 00:00:00
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