Palestinians Oppose The Building Of New Hospital

Palestinians: What Is Wrong With Building a Hospital?

by Bassam Tawil

• One would expect Palestinian leaders to have welcomed a new hospital that would serve the two million residents of the Gaza Strip. These leaders, however, have no problem sacrificing the lives of Palestinian patients on the altar of their hatred of the peace plan.
  
  
• The Palestinian Authority leadership is right about one thing: one party in this conflict is indeed using the dispute for its own ends – but it is not the Trump administration. The only party that deserves blame is Abbas and his associates. They are rejecting a desperately needed medical facility solely in order to be able to continue to lay the blame for the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip at the doorstep of Israel.
  
  
• The Palestinian Authority is probably the only government worldwide that views establishing a modern hospital as a "conspiracy." It now remains to be seen whether the international community will cave in to Abbas's campaign and ditch the hospital project, or decide actually to help the Palestinian people, whose leaders know only how to help themselves.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It hardly counts as news that Palestinian Authority leaders are obsessed with US President Donald J. Trump and his administration. Yet, these leaders have actually reached a new depth of obsession: they are now seeking to prevent the establishment of a new hospital for their people in the Gaza Strip.
  
  
  The new field hospital, consisting of 16 departments, is slated to be built near the Erez border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The hospital was approved by Israel as part of ceasefire understandings reached during the past few weeks with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip under the auspices of the United Nations, Qatar and Egypt.
  
  
  The 43,000-square foot hospital will rely on the infrastructure, expertise and resources of an international NGO named Friendship and is meant to ensure a significant improvement in medical services to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
  
  
  Bizarrely, while Israel has approved the project, Palestinian Authority officials are trying to foil it. Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Mai Kaila, during a meeting in her West Bank office in Ramallah, reportedly told the UN Deputy Special Coordinator for Middle East Peace Process Jimmy McGoldrick on July 31 that the field hospital was part of a plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian Authority government considers the plan to build a hospital a "part of the Deal of the Century."
  
  
  
  
  "If the objective of establishing this hospital is humane, it would have been better to support and develop existing hospitals in the Gaza Strip," the Palestinian minister told the UN official. "This project wears the dress of humanity while concealing a dangerous political aspect."
  
  
  Kaila asked the UN official to relay a message to all relevant parties: The Palestinian Authority government has effectively washed its hands of the new hospital.
  
  
  One would expect Palestinian leaders to have welcomed a new hospital that would serve the two million residents of the Gaza Strip. These leaders, however, have no problem sacrificing the lives of Palestinian patients on the altar of their hatred of the peace plan.
  
  
  Palestinian Authority officials have justified their opposition to the construction of the hospital by arguing that it is designed to "separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip."
  
  
  
  
  "The hospital that Israel and the US are seeking to establish on the northern border of the Gaza Strip," the Palestinian government had already stated on July 8, "is part of ongoing attempts to solidify the separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank under humanitarian pretexts."
  
  
  This claim is totally baseless to the point of being surreal.