A baby with an inborn cardiac defect, a two-year-old with kidney disease, a cancer patient with a liver tumor, and another with a brain tumor - these are only a few of the 17 terminally ill Gazans whose entry into Israel has been delayed and whose cases were raised Thursday in a petition submitted by Physicians for Human Rights to the High Court of Justice (HCJ).
The petitioners claim that the state changed its mode of operation and has not denied the immediate entry requests of terminally ill patients from Gaza, only "delayed" responding.
"(Recent months) have witnessed a change in Israel's policy regarding exit permits for ill Palestinians from the Gaza strip," the petition's authors write. According to them, permitting passage through the Erez crossing has undergone a policy change, whereby requests for immediate entry of ill Palestinians are not denied outright but rather delayed for weeks or months at a time.
This new policy leaves the patients wallowing in uncertainty. "As a result of delaying the response, Israel has denied the terminally ill Gazans from appealing the exit prohibition, as appeals are only dealt with after a refusal is issue," the petitioners claim.
Ran Yaron, an activist in the Occupied Territories division of Physicians for Human Rights, blamed the Shin Bet and the border authorities at Erez of trying to "have their cake and eat it too.
"On the one hand, the state isn't allowing the patients to leave Gaza given the area's status as a 'hostile entity', and on the other hand it is avoiding pressure from the HCJ to find a way to ensure the passage of terminally ill patients in need of treatment outside of Gaza."
The petition claims that Israel is intentionally concealing medical information from human rights organizations: "The state is working to prevent easy access to statistics concerning its denial and postponement of entry permits, in a manner that makes public criticism difficult."
Waiting to enter since September
The petition was submitted in the name of 17 ill Gazans, who have been told to seek immediate medical treatment in medical centers in Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt. The applications of 13 of them have been delayed for weeks or months already, and two of them suffer from tumors, one in the brain and one in the liver. The two have been waiting at least two months for a response.
Yaron told Ynet that the patients are deteriorating every day: "For these patients there is no difference between refusal and delay – the bottom line is that their health is deteriorating and, as experience has taught us, some of them will pass away while waiting for an answer."