Israeli Doctors Treating Terrorists

Motek

Wed, Jun 27 2007, 10:20 pm

Quote:

Shot by their own side, healed by the enemy
By Charles Levinson in Ashkelon, Sunday Telegraph

In the Gaza Strip's Jab aliya refugee camp, Aref Suleiman was raised on Palestinian struggle against the Jewish state. Today he lies in an Israeli hospital bed, his body riddled with Palestinian bullets, his wounds tended daily by Israeli nurses.

For the 22-year-old Mr Suleiman, who was shot five times point blank by Hamas militants last month during a renewed bout of Palestinian infighting, this is not the Arab-Israeli conflict he learnt about as a child growing up in Gaza's desperate, rubbish-strewn alleys.

"Palestinians shoot me and Jews treat me," he laughs bitterly. "It was supposed to be different."

advertisementThe Barzilai Hospital sits on a sandy hilltop above the Mediterranean Sea in the southern Israeli port city of Ashkelon. In recent months, five Palestinian rockets have landed in the grassy dunes that encircle it, just six miles from the Gaza Strip.

Barzilai, however, has become a rare bastion of civility in an increasingly hate-filled conflict and a unique meeting ground for two peoples who otherwise have little direct contact.

Wounded Palestinians who get permission from the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army are allowed into Israel to seek medical treatment that is not available at Gaza's rudimentary clinics. Here, Israelis and Palestinians meet their erstwhile foe, in many cases for the first time in their lives.

Mr Suleiman, who was only 15 when the second intifada erupted in 2000, had never been to Israel or met an Israeli. Suleiman, a guard in the Palestinian security services who was a devoted follower of the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat.

As he flirts with the Israeli nurses who bring him lunch, check his wounds and blood pressure and empty his bed pan, Suleiman seems, at least for the time being, to have forgotten historical grievances.

"The Jews are like honey, like flowers," he says theatrically. "They wash me, clean me, and change my gown every day. Even in my home, my own family wouldn't change me every day."

"Here, everything is beseder," he adds, using the Hebrew word for "okay".

For the young Israeli nurses, most from nearby communities that live in constant fear of the Palestinian rocket fire, the cultural exchange flows both ways. The Palestinian patients they treat put a human face on the conflict. Nurse and patient can even find a shred of common cause now that the Islamist Hamas movement, which has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings, is locked in a deadly power struggle with the more moderate Fatah movement.

Victims on both sides of the war's de facto frontline are treated side by side here. Five doors down from Mr Suleiman, Ludmilla Visiptzky, 60, awaits her third session of surgery to patch up the shrapnel wounds she suffered when a Palestinian Qassam rocket struck her home in mid-May.

Both confined to their hospital beds, the two patients have had little contact, but each knows the other is within shouting distance. Meanwhile Nurse Kokhava Kohi, says gleefully of her patient, Mr Suleiman: "He's going to go home and shoot Hamas in the head," - as if that alone would justify her daily ministrations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new.....0.xml

Seraph

Thu, Jun 28 2007, 5:51 am

I have a big issue with doctors treating terrorists.
Yes, arabs that throw rocks at vehicles ARE terrorists. Many people were hospitalized in serious condition (as in coma, etc) because of "simple little rock attacks".
The only reason they attack with rocks is because thats the only weapon they have. If they have bullets and guns, they'd use that.

Especially, however, if these are convicted terrorists who shot and killed people, terrorists with blood on their hands.
I'm not saying the doctor should kill them- that is playing god, but why should he treat them either? Especially if it was a terrorist who was injured during an act of terrorism...
If Hashem wants the terrorist to get better, Hashem will find a way for him to be better. A jew shouldn't go out and help a person who is swearing to kill him. (Same reason I think israel should cut off all water and electricity and gas to gaza- but thats another topic.) You don't go HELP someone who wants to kill you. They got themselves in their bad position- yes, they got injured mostly by committing terrorist attacks, and then they expect you to treat them?

What someone posted about would be suicide bombers in hospitals is so true.
The arabs want their own country, fine- let them first start off by having their own hospitals, treating their own people. Why should bloodthirsty people in ambulances be given clearance at checkpoints only that they could blow themselves up and take some jews with them?
They have doctors. Let them treat their own.

Btw, I worked for a dentist, who when he was working as an army dentist, had to treat a convicted terrorist. Lets just say he went very light on the novocaine for this guy's root canal...