ISRAELI settlements are becoming an “existential threat” to Palestinians, according to a charity worker based in the West Bank.
Aseel Baidoun told The National that state-backed violence is now combined with the strangulation of the Palestinian healthcare system and “dismantling the system that keeps us alive”.
Children have died at the growing number of Israeli checkpoints which impede Palestinians travelling from one part of the “fragmented” territory to another, said Medical Aid for Palestinians’ deputy director of advocacy and campaigns.
In one case, a four-month old baby died after an ambulance racing him to a hospital in Ramallah was stopped by Israeli border guards.
Baidoun said: “His name was Ahmad Zaid he stopped breathing at home in the Deir Ammar refugee camp and one of the people called an ambulance. The hospital was not that far away but the gate was closed at Deir Ammar refugee camp.
“His father really tried to beg the soldiers to open but they couldn’t and he died at the checkpoint. He was only four months. He stopped breathing so we cannot tell, as MAP, if he could be saved but you can tell that he died at the checkpoint with an ambulance waiting for the gate to be opened.”
The child had been given oxygen in the ambulance and his father carried him towards the guards telling them to “shoot me, just let my son pass”, which was met with tear gas and stun grenades by the soldiers, according to a report about the incident in Al Jazeera last month.
In another case, a pregnant woman delivered her stillborn baby while her ambulance was blocked from getting into a hospital which was being raided by the Israeli military, Baidoun said.
The raid on the Rafidia hospital in Nablus saw four women forced to deliver their children in ambulances, Baidoun said.
“One of them lost their infant because she had complications during the pregnancy and had to deliver the baby in the ambulance,” she said.
Baidoun added: “They are people that really needed urgent healthcare but, due to the closures and restrictions, they were not able to reach it on time and they lost their lives.
“I’m not sure if they were able to get to the hospital, they would be saved or not, but I know that they died waiting.”
Aside from the difficulties in accessing emergency care, the broader health system is a feeble state.
Cancer patients are unable to access medicines, dialysis patients face filter shortages and around 180 out of 520 essential drugs are at zero stock, Baidoun said.
Critical care procedures have been delayed because medics face obstacles even reaching their places of work because of the sprawling network of Israeli checkpoints, which Baidoun said had grown in number by more than 900 since October 2023.
The picture is made yet more complex by the medical workers’ strike in the West Bank, which was triggered by Israel withholding funds to the Palestinian Authority which meant doctors and other staff were being paid laid and only partially.
Baidoun said: “Medical staff are human beings, they need to be paid, they cannot be volunteering. How can they support their families?”
The Palestinian Medical Association launched the strike in May, which cut primary care centres and reduced the service to emergency and life-saving care, Arab News reported last month. Since then the strike has been partially lifted but capacity remains reduced.
Everyday life has been made intolerable, Baidoun said, with West Bank residents living under constant fear of attacks by Israeli settlers, the military or both.
“It’s becoming almost impossible to feel safe” she said. “People are really worried at night, even while they’re sleeping in their own houses, they worry that they will be subjected to any attack, at any moment.”
Palestinians are forced to endure these indignities because the alternative is being shot by settlers or their military backers, the charity worker said.
“If you resist a settler, that means they will shoot you on the spot, if the settler does not shoot you, the soldier next to him will,” Baidoun added. “The only right we have right now, when we are subjected to settler violence, is to suffer or die in silence.”
Even as a relatively privileged Palestinian with a job, living in Ramallah, Baidoun said she struggles to see a future for herself in the West Bank.
“I personally no longer see life in the West Bank,” she said.
“I keep thinking, ‘What’s my Plan B? What do I do?’ I may lose my job because every international organisation is under threat of [Israel] seizing operations and I’m so scared of travelling around, I’m not sure if I can access healthcare and I'm one of the privileged Palestinians, so imagine if you lived next to a settlement.”
