By the time Israel’s first retaliatory airstrike struck the Gaza Strip, Ron Finkel was already thinking two steps ahead. “We had to think ‘what happens the day after’,” says the founder of the Australian charity, Project Rozana International, which has provided healthcare to Palestinians since 2013. “Whenever that day after is, we need to be providing a response to the critical care needs.”
The charity is a player among a group of aid and development organisations anxiously waiting for the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to reopen so they can send critical aid and start planning to rebuild what has been lost.
Project Rozana has put forward a proposal to the Australian government for it to fund what the charity believes it can do to help: build a triage hospital in partnership with the Red Crescent (Red Cross) hospital in Gaza and upgrade its 20 ambulances. Only four of the hospital’s ambulances are equipped to carry wounded people.
The hope is the triage hospital can determine whether a patient can get the care they need in Gaza’s hospitals, or if the level of care they need requires them to be taken to a hospital in East Jerusalem or Israel.
It also wants to expand its current bus fleet, to help get critically ill Gazan residents to hospitals in East Jerusalem.
“The initiative is to put in place something measurable, practical, and impactful,” says Finkel. “And also something that makes Australians feel that they’re making a contribution and making a difference.
“We want to get this going immediately as soon as the opportunity allows.”
On Saturday, the foreign minister, Penny Wong, announced $10m in initial humanitarian funding to assist Palestinians in Gaza, with $3m to be committed to the Red Cross and $7m to the United Nations.
The Australian Council for International Development has urged the Australian government to also call for a ceasefire, which the council’s chief executive, Marc Purcell, said under the circumstances is “is the only way that humanitarian access and civilian protection can be upheld”.
The government has called on Israel and Hamas to exercise restraint and protect civilian lives, but is yet to directly call for a ceasefire. On Monday, a resolution put forward by the Russian Federation in the UN’s security council calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza was rejected by France, Japan, the US and the UK.
Project Rozana International’s plan builds on the existing work the charity already does to reveal the significant disparities between the healthcare systems in Israel and Gaza. A core part of its work, through a network of Palestinian and Jewish volunteers, is to take critically ill Gazan residents – particularly children who can’t access cancer or dialysis treatment in Gaza – to hospitals in East Jerusalem.
The former Australian of the year Dr Jamal Rifi, who works with the charity, says since the escalation between Hamas and Israel began none of the children the charity supports have been able to cross the border to get dialysis or cancer treatment.
Israeli volunteers would meet the children and families at the border then take them the rest of the way to the hospital – but the volunteer network has also fractured amid the conflict’s escalation.
Rifi says they fear for the whereabouts of one of the volunteers, who was living in a kibbutz near the border and would take the children to hospital three times a week. They have not heard from her since the escalation began.
“We have a cohort of patients who haven’t had dialysis for the past two and a half weeks and we need to be ready for when we can get them there,” says Rifi.
When Rifi heard the news of the blast at the Gaza hospital that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said killed at least 500 people and which both Israel and Hamas deny they caused, he said he felt physically ill, first and foremost at the loss and disregard for life. It was also another hit to a healthcare system that, before the conflict, was already “doing the best it could with what little it had”.
“Palestinians are resilient people,” says Rifi. “The doctors, they work hard and they don’t do it for money but for the love of the profession.
“Without any doubt they will work until exhaustion, but we need to be ready to relieve them.”
