Treating wounded Palestinians is a life-and-death matter for Palestinian medics

Attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers on Palestinian paramedics, their patients and their ambulances have skyrocketed, not only in Gaza but also in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.

Paramedics are assaulted, shot at — and in some cases killed.  

“When we go to help wounded Palestinians we never know whether we will reach them, if we will be able to treat them, whether we or our ambulances, will be shot at and attacked by Israeli soldiers or settlers or whether we will get out alive,” Muhammad Jabareen, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Hebron, in the southern West Bank, told The New Arab.

Since October 7, Israeli security forces have launched unprecedented and indiscriminate attacks on Gaza’s and the West Bank’s health facilities in what appears to be a deliberate campaign to render the health sector inoperable.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW) hospitals, health facilities, medical staff and ambulances have been repeatedly bombed with many of Gaza’s hospitals and facilities no longer operating.

By early February the Palestinian Health Ministry said over 300 Palestinian medics were killed in Gaza alone, another 900 injured and 100 detained by Israeli security forces.

These indiscriminate attacks are part of Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine, named after the western suburb of Beirut. In this Hezbollah stronghold, the Israeli military formulated a policy of inflicting enormous infrastructural damage on enemy territories as a punitive measure as well as a strategy to encourage their civilian populations to pressure combatants to surrender.

However, while the world’s attention is focused on the ongoing carnage and destruction in Gaza, the West Bank attacks have gone largely unnoticed despite the worsening situation.

The PRCS society reported that from October 7 last year until mid-March 2024, there were 101 violations against medical staff, 82 violations against medical vehicles including ambulances, and 102 violations against patients and injured Palestinians within ambulances in the West Bank.

“The situation was bad before but now it is horrendous,” said Jabareen.

He said that in his 13 years as a paramedic he had been attacked four times by Israeli soldiers and settlers.

“During one of the beatings, Israeli soldiers fractured bones in my hand and my arm. In another incident one of my colleagues sustained glass fragment injuries to his shoulder from a shattered window after soldiers shot at one of our ambulances,” he said. 

These attacks are part of a general uptick of settler attacks in the territory on Palestinians, their property, their agricultural fields and their livestock by settlers who often carry out the attacks with the support, and under protection, of Israeli soldiers.

“This violence is not new but the situation has got a lot worse since October,” Palestinian nurse Ameen Tawil, from the village of Dahariya near Hebron, told The New Arab.

Both Amnesty International and HRW accuse the Israeli government of not only condoning these attacks but actively supporting them with extreme right-wing ministers advocating for the annexation of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.

Soldiers and settlers have also killed paramedics in the West Bank.

On August 2, the latest medical fatality involved a paramedic who was killed after he sustained head and leg injuries from an Israeli attack on Balata refugee camp near Nablus in the northern West Bank.

Jabareen explained that another difficulty facing ambulance drivers and paramedics was the inability to reach wounded Palestinians as often the roads were blocked by Israeli soldiers who deliberately prevented the ambulances from accessing the injured, leaving some of them to bleed out and die.

“And in the cases when we are able to reach the injured and get them into the ambulances, sometimes the soldiers stop us and remove the patients and arrest them, irrespective of how badly injured they are,” Jabareen added. 

He further explained that entering the H2 area of Hebron, under full Israeli control, required coordination with the Israeli authorities and the Red Cross.

“When we leave the H1 area of Hebron, under Palestinian control, we are often forced to wait for long periods before the soldiers allow us to pass, to only a street away in the same city.

“Sometimes despite prior coordination and approval by the Israeli authorities, the soldiers refuse to let us pass anyway. And if there is a seriously injured Palestinian waiting to be evacuated there is nothing we can do,” said Jabareen.

Tawil said Israeli soldiers also raided hospitals, forcibly removing the wounded Palestinians.

“Last Tuesday they raided the Al Ahli Hospital in Hebron and took two young men away while abusing staff. Sometimes they also vandalise medical equipment during these raids and force us to close,” added Tawil.

Periodically patients need to travel to the defacto capital Ramallah for specialised treatment.

“It’s now very difficult and takes a lot longer to get to Ramallah from Hebron — a journey which previously took about two-and-a-half hours can now take up to five hours because many of the main roads have been closed by the Israeli authorities on security grounds,” said Tawil.

“But also because soldiers at the military roadblocks often force Palestinian commuters and ambulances to wait for hours just to make life hard for Palestinians.”

Despite the precarious situation and the enormous difficulties they face both Jabareen and Tawil told The New Arab that they would continue to fight for the lives and health of sick and wounded Palestinians.

Mel Frykberg is an international journalist and correspondent who has worked for and reported for various international media outlets. She has reported from Lebanon, Libya, South Sudan, Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, Egypt, Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa