[WCUSP] Just another facet of ethnic cleansing...pregnant Palestinian women (J. Hari: The Independent)

Tue Jan 2 13:19:08 CST 2007

More to cry about Yvonne
--- Lieve Snellings <lieve.snellings at pandora.be>
wrote:

> From: "Lieve Snellings" <lieve.snellings at pandora.be>
> To: <womeninblack at listas.nodo50.org>
> Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 11:52:48 +0100
> Subject: [womeninblack] [ePalestine] Just another
> facet of ethnic
> 	cleansing...pregnant Palestinian women (J. Hari:
> The Independent)
> 
> Dear, Dearest,
> Let's hope 2007 brings us a bit closer to peace
> A first start would be that all women who call
> themselves Women in Black do agree with the first
> WiB demand, from the very beginning of WiB: "end the
> occupation" !  
> lots of love
> lieve
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Paula Abrams-Hourani 
> 
> 
> Dear,
> 
> First of all, very best wishes to you for the new
> year.  Let us hope, although everything seems very
> bleak, that it will bring peace and justice for more
> people on this earth.  
> 
> I forward this article from Elana, one of the great
> women I met in Jerusalem at our conference, and
> believe it is a very important article as it talks
> about what is happening to pregnant women in the
> Occupied Territories.  How long all of this will be
> allowed to continue is anyone's guess.  It is a
> shame that the international community and its
> leaders let this happen without one word of
> reproach. 
> 
>   
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: Elana Wesley 
> 
> 
> [Yes, this was published in the INDEPENDENT from the
> UK. - Elana]
> 
> 
> The Independent (UK) 
> 
> 
> Independent Appeal: 'What would happen if the Virgin
> Mary came to Bethlehem today?'    
> 
> 
> Johann Hari on the plight of pregnant women in the
> West Bank, where babies are dying needlessly   
> 
> 
> Published: 23 December 2006  
> 
> 
> In two days, a third of humanity will gather to
> celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee
> in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another
> mother in another glorified stable in this
> rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to
> howl.  
> 
> 
> Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a
> weary, watery smile. "What would happen if the
> Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would
> endure what I have endured," she says.  
> 
> 
> Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard
> into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged
> sentences what happened. "It was 5pm when I started
> to feel the contractions coming on," she says. She
> was already nervous about the birth - her first, and
> twins - so she told her husband to grab her hospital
> bag and get her straight into the car.  
> 
> 
> They stopped to collect her sister and mother and
> set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away.
> But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers,
> who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning.
> "Obviously, we told them we couldn't wait until the
> morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back
> seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood
> and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing
> that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn't
> understand."  
> 
> 
> Her family begged the soldiers to let them through,
> but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back
> seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and
> no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud
> and a tiny girl called Mariam. "I don't remember
> anything else until I woke up in the hospital," she
> says now. For two days, her family hid it from her
> that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could
> "certainly" have saved his life by getting him to an
> incubator.  
> 
> 
> "Now Mariam is at an age when she asks me where her
> brother is," Fadia says. "She wants to know what
> happened to him. But how do I explain it?" She looks
> down. "Sometimes at night I scream and scream." In
> the years since, she has been pregnant four times,
> but she keeps miscarrying. "I couldn't bear to make
> another baby. I was convinced the same thing would
> happen to me again," she explains. "When I see the
> [Israeli] soldiers I keep thinking - what did my
> baby do to Israel?"  
> 
> 
> Since Fadia's delivery, in 2002, the United Nations
> confirms that a total of 36 babies have died because
> their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli
> checkpoints. All across Bethlehem - all across the
> West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are
> being disturbed, or worse, by the military
> occupation of their land.  
> 
> 
> In Salfit, on the other side of the West Bank,
> Jamilla Alahad Naim, 29, is waiting for the first
> medical check-up of her five-month pregnancy. "I am
> frightened all the time," she says. "I am frightened
> for my baby because I have had very little medical
> treatment and I cannot afford good food ... I know I
> will give birth at home with no help, like I did
> with Mohammed [her last child]. I am too frightened
> to go to hospital because there are two checkpoints
> between our home [and there] and I know if you are
> detained by the soldiers, the mother or the baby can
> die out there in the cold. But giving birth at home
> is very dangerous too."  
> 
> 
> Hindia Abu Nabah - a steely 31-year-old staff nurse
> at Al Zawya Clinic, in Salfit district - says it is
> "a nightmare" to be pregnant in the West Bank today.
> "Recently, two of our pregnant patients here were
> tear-gassed in their homes ... The women couldn't
> breathe and went into premature labour. By the time
> we got there, the babies had been delivered
> stillborn."  
> 
> 
> Many of the medical problems afflicting pregnant
> women here are more mundane than Jamilla's darkest
> fears: 30 per cent of pregnant Palestinians suffer
> from anaemia, a lack of red blood cells. The extreme
> poverty caused by the siege and now the
> international boycott seems to be a key factor. The
> doctors here warn grimly that as ordinary
> Palestinians' income evaporates, they eat more
> staples and fewer proteins - a recipe for anaemia.
> There is some evidence, they add, that women are
> giving the best food to their husbands and children,
> and subsisting on gristle and scraps. The anaemia
> leaves women at increased risk of bleeding heavily
> and contracting an infection during childbirth.  
> 
> 
> Earlier this year, conditions for pregnant women in
> the West Bank - already poor - fell off a cliff.
> Following the election of Hamas, the world choked
> off funding for the Palestinian Authority, which
> suddenly found itself unable to pay its doctors and
> nurses. After several months medical staff went on
> strike, refusing to take anything but emergency
> cases. For more than three months, the maternity
> wards of the West Bank were empty and echoing. Beds
> lay, perfectly made, waiting for patients who could
> not come.  
> 
> 
> In all this time, there were no vitamins handed out,
> no ultrasound scans, no detection of congenital
> abnormalities. Imagine that the NHS had simply
> packed up and stopped one day and did not reopen for
> 12 weeks, and you get a sense of the scale of the
> medical disaster.  
> 
> 
> Some women were wealthy enough to go to the few
> private hospitals scattered across the West Bank.
> Most were not. So because of the international
> boycott of the Palestinians, every hospital warns
> there has been an unseen, unreported increase in
> home births on the West Bank.  
> 
> 
> I found Dr Hamdan Hamdan, the head of maternity
> services at Hussein Hospital, Bethlehem, pacing
> around an empty ward, chain-smoking. "This ward is
> usually full," he said. "The women who should be in
> this hospital - what is happening to them?"  
> 
> 
> They have been giving birth in startlingly similar
> conditions to those suffered by Mary 2,000 years
> ago. They have delivered their babies with no
> doctors, no sterilised equipment, no back-up if
> there are complications. They have been boycotted
> back into the Stone Age. The strike ended this month
> after the PA raised funds from Muslim countries -
> but the effects of stopping maternity services are
> only now becoming clear. Hindia Abu Nabah says:
> "There is a clear link between the deteriorating
> health situation and the international boycott.  
> 
> 
> Amid this horror, one charity has been supporting
> pregnant Palestinian women even as their medical
> services fell apart.  
> 
> 
> Merlin - one of the three charities being supported
> by the Independent Christmas Appeal - has set up two
> mobile teams, with a full-time gynaecologist and a
> pediatrician, to take medical services to the parts
> of the West Bank cut off by the Israeli occupation.
> They provide lab technicians and ultrasound machines
> - the fruits of the 21st century.  
> 
> 
> I travelled with the team to the Salfit region -
> scarred by Israeli settlements pumping out raw
> sewage on to Palestinian land - to see women and
> children desperately congregating around them
> seeking help. Amid the dozens of nervous women and
> swarms of sickly children, Rahme Jima, 29, is
> sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap. She
> is in the last month of her pregnancy, and this is
> the first time she has seen a doctor since she
> conceived.  
> 
> 
> "The nearest hospital is in Nablus, and we can't
> afford to pay for the transport to get there through
> all the checkpoints," she says, revealing she is
> planning - in despair - to give birth at home. Even
> if she had the cash, she says she is "too frightened
> of being detained at the checkpoint and being forced
> to give birth there". She sighs, and adds: "I will
> be so relieved to finally be seen by a doctor, I
> have been so worried." But when she returns from
> seeing the doctor, she says: "I have anaemia, and
> they have given me iron supplements," supplied by
> Merlin. She can't afford to eat well; she lives with
> her husband and four children in a room in her
> mother-in-law's house, and her husband, Joseph, has
> been unemployed since his permit to move through the
> checkpoints expired. "The doctor says I should have
> been seen much earlier in my pregnancy. My baby will
> probably be born too small."  
> 
> 
> All the problems afflicting these 21st century Marys
> are paraded in Merlin's clinic. One terrified,
> terrorised mother after another presents herself to
> the specialists here, and leaves clutching packs of
> folic acid, calcium, iron and medicine. Dr Bassam
> Said Nadi, the senior medical officer for this area,
> says: "I thank Merlin for the specialist care they
> have brought. Not long ago, we didn't even have
> petrol in our cars. Alongside other organisations,
> they are helping us survive this terrible period in
> our country's history."  
> 
> 
> Merlin can only maintain these mobile clinics with
> your help. Leaning in the doorway of her bare
> clinic, Hindia Abu Nabah says: "Tell your readers
> that we need their help. There are no Hamas or Fatah
> foetuses. They don't deserve to be punished. I
> couldn't stand to look another anaemic woman in the
> eye and tell her that her baby will be underweight
> or malformed and we don't have iron supplements to
> give her. I can't go back to that. I can't."  
> 
> 
>
http://news.independent.co.uk/appeals/indy_appeal/article2097790.ece
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