Testimony from PRCS medics

I've probably mentioned it before, but I subscribe to the Palestine Red
Crescent Society's [1] daily and weekly press releases [2].  The PRCS is a
branch of the Red Cross.  They do humanitarian work in occupied Palestine,
drive ambulances, staff hospitals, etc.  There daily reports detail
encounters with the Israeli army at checkpoints, report military actions
against the Palestinians, and so on.  The weekly report summarizes the
activity for the week.  This past week's report is representative of most
weeks [3].  Some weeks are quieter than others, and by that I mean some
weeks are quieter than others in the way that I'm sure some weeks in hell
are quieter than others.  The reports are clinical and dry but they serve as
a daily reminder of the terror of living in Palestine.  Something you won't
find in the U.S. press.

But back to the point, I came across a couple testimonies from PRCS
paramedics.  They provide a nice supplement to the clinical reports.  Both
are appended below.  Enjoy.

David

[1] http://www.palestinercs.org/
[2] http://www.palestinercs.org/emaillistform.htm
[3] http://www.palestinercs.org/pressreleases/PR160804WBRR.htm
[4] http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=1008
[5] http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=891

=============================================================================

      PRCS paramedic: "You tell me why I am face-down on the ground"
      GHASSAN ABU IBAID
      FromOccupiedPalestine.org, 18 November 2003

      Ghassan Abu Ibaid, 43, is a paramedic with the Palestine Red Crescent
Society in Jenin. He has five children and a sixth on the way. In February,
he will be moving with his family to California. We interviewed him in the
sitting area of the PRCS building, while the television in the background
relayed news of the Maxim Restaurant bombing in Haifa that had happened only
minutes earlier.
      Ghassan Abu Ibaid, PRCS Paramedic: I would like to relate to you
stories that will show the kind of hatred and contempt that the Israeli army
has for our people, the people of Palestine. I’ll tell you one of the
stories that happened to me during the siege that was laid on the Camp in
April of 2002. It happened on 8 April, four days after the incursion began
when the army had finally allowed us to go in to the Camp so that we could
clear some of the injured.

      There were three injured people who the Israeli army had allowed us to
go in for, so three ambulances went in. We started at 1:00 pm and we were
finally out at 4:00 pm - it took us three hours and this distance is only
about 100 meters. Before we could pick up the wounded, the Israeli army
forced us to go to the soldiers and have our ambulances searched. After we
had cleared out the wounded people, we had to go back to the occupation army
to be searched again.

      The leg of one the wounded men that we cleared out was cut and rotten,
with flies and bugs swarming all over it. His body was full of shrapnel.
When I came back to the Israeli Occupation Forces they attacked me and
demanded to see documentation. The kid who as with me didn’t have his
documentation, he only had a photocopy of his hawiya, his ID card. So they
told me "This guy is wanted, this guy is Hamas." They ordered me to take off
all of his clothes. I submitted to these orders and I stripped him of all of
his clothes except for his underwear. Indeed, this person’s body was
absolutely full of shrapnel. He was absolutely unable to stand up, and yet
they forced him to stand up and dragged him away. As for me, they asked me
to lay on the ground face-down while they went and arrested him.

      An hour and a half later I was still face down on the ground, and one
of the soldiers said: "Come over here." He turned out to be an intelligence
officer, and he said, "What’s the deal with you? Why are you face-down on
the ground?" I said "I don’t know. I want you to tell me why I am face down
on the ground." He said "I’m sorry, a mistake has happened." And he
permitted my release at that point. But they still arrested the wounded man
who was absolutely in need of medical attention and not prison at this
point. This just shows you the maltreatment that the Israeli army constantly
bestows upon the Palestinian people.

      ~~~

      On 10 April 2002, the 6th day of the invasion of the Jenin refugee
camp, people began to flee the camp and congregate at the PRCS centre. After
we ran out of food and water people were forced to leave the centre to go
looking for more. Myself and several other PRCS paramedics led this march.
The Occupation Forces came and began to attack all of the men in the group,
as well as all of the people who were in Red Crescent uniforms. They
handcuffed our hands and tied us up, and after two hours we were put into a
military transport vehicle and taken to the Salem military base where we sat
for four days.

      After the four days, the International Committee of the Red Cross
intervened, and finally we were released on the 13th or 14th of that month.

      ~~~

      On 8 August of this year we received a report at around four o’clock
that there were people wounded in the Eastern district of Jenin. We went
over, and found that there were indeed wounded people. One man had been shot
in both his knees, and as I was taking this person out, the Israeli soldiers
began firing at the ambulance. There were four bullets that hit the
ambulance directly, and one bullet that ricocheted off of a wall and hit me
right in the knee. I had to have surgery to repair the damage. This stopped
me from walking for approximately one month before I finally recovered.

      ~~~

      Another time, in November of 2002, while we were transporting a female
patient from Jenin Hospital to al Razi hospital in Jenin, an Israeli
military tank came and blocked our way. Soldiers came out and arrested all
of the people who were in uniform, all of the paramedics. They took us to al
Jalame where we stayed for ten hours, leaving the patient in the ambulance
until a French international by the name of Olivier finally got into the
ambulance and took the woman to the hospital.

      ~~~

      Finally, one of the stories that I would like to recount happened only
two days ago when I was in Jericho.

      I attended to a woman from Jenin who was in Jordan for an operation to
amputate her leg. When I got to the al Hamra checkpoint between Jenin and
Jericho, I went to the front of the line and parked right in front of one of
the Israeli soldiers who seemed to be in charge of the checkpoint. He came
to me and asked why I had come to the front of the line. I said to him: "I
have a patient who is very sick. She has an amputated leg. She has to get to
her home as quickly as possible. I also have a paralysed child."

      The commander ordered me to go to the very back of the line to be the
last car. I got a feeling of such hatred and contempt from this commander. I
said to him: "This woman she is sick." He said to me "I don’t care, tell her
to die. I have no sympathy for her." So I went to the back of the line, the
last car, where I waited about an hour until I was finally able to pass
through the checkpoint.

      *Testimony taken by Valerie Zink and Jon Elmer - Jenin, West Bank on 4
October 2003; Translated by Tarek Loubani.

=============================================================================

Testimony: Paramedics under siege
MAHMOUD HUSSIN BAJAWI
Jenin Palestine Red Crescent Society, 17 October 2003

We spoke with Mahmoud in the sleeping quarters of the Palestine Red Crescent
Society station in Jenin on the afternoon of October fourth. As the old
ceiling fan hummed and one of Mahmoud's colleagues slept nearby underneath a
clothesline of PRCS uniforms, Mahmoud spoke with distant reflection and
thoughtfulness. Biting his lip and swallowing deeply, he recalled the
stories slowly between pulls on his Arabic cigarettes.

Born and raised in Jenin, Mahmoud is 35 years old and has been a PRCS
paramedic for ten years. He has been arrested, beaten, humiliated and shot
many times. He has 23 pieces of Israeli shrapnel embedded in his back, chest
and shoulders.

Showing us pictures of his three children - six, three and one - he said,
"every time I see them when I return home from work, I cry. I think of the
three children of my colleague who was killed beside me. I haven't slept
properly in one year, since he was killed. But what can I do? I love my
job... to help our people - but there is no cover from the tanks, the
Apaches..."



Mahmoud Bajawi, EMT Paramedic, Jenin: It was the eleventh of July 2003. I
was heading out to transport a wounded patient from the village of Yaban
when an Israeli tank intercepted us at the entrance to Jenin. The soldiers
came out of the tank, tied me up, threw me on the ground and arrested me. I
waited there on the ground for about three hours before an Israeli patrol
came and transported me to an Israeli jail.

I spent 12 days in the Israeli jail, during which I was interrogated and
accused of carrying wounded Palestinian fighters. In a long discussion in
the interrogation room I told them that it was my right as an ambulance
medic to care for wounded Palestinian fighters, and indeed to care for any
wounded Palestinian regardless of his or her activities. I told them that
this right is codified in the Geneva Conventions, and in all basic
international human rights norms - in particular those that address the
transportation of the wounded, whether military of civilian, during times of
conflict.

After 12 days, they released me from jail, knowing that from the very
beginning they had no reason to detain me.

In the past, they have also accused us of transporting weapons in our
ambulances. They search the ambulances time and time again, and find no
weapons. We know the real purpose of the Israeli army's activities: to delay
and to impede the work of the PRCS ambulances and paramedics. These
ambulances are the only vehicles that can travel during times of curfew, and
transport the wounded and the dead.

Among the many other transgressions of the Israeli army against the PRCS [to
impede our work] is the holding of ambulances for several hours, and firing
at ambulances on more than one occasion. This state of affairs has not
stopped; it continues to this very moment. For three years, since the
beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada, these provocations by the Israeli army
against our ambulances have not stopped.

~~~

On the fourth of March 2002, there was an incursion into the city of Jenin
and the Jenin refugee camp. The tanks came in on the evening of March third,
and as workers of the PRCS we were prepared to receive many calls to aid the
wounded and transport the martyrs [the term martyr is used to refer to
anyone killed by the Israelis. People who die in conflict are considered by
Islam to be "not dead", but living in paradise.]

On the morning of March fourth, there were four PRCS ambulances working in
the Jenin refugee camp to transport the wounded. They worked from the
morning until one in the afternoon transporting the dead, as well as dozens
of wounded people. The Israeli Occupation Forces had placed the ambulances
under great duress. With tanks and soldiers they impeded the ambulances from
carrying the wounded out of the camp.

During that time of difficulty, one of the PRCS ambulances was bombed with
high-energy incendiary grenades, resulting in the martyrdom of Dr. Khalil
Suleiman [Director of the Jenin PRCS], the injury of three paramedics with
very severe burns, and the complete incineration of his ambulance.

This incident happened while all of the movements of the PRCS ambulances
into the Refugee Camp were supervised, authorized and coordinated by the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the relevant Israeli
officials.

~~~

Three days after the martyrdom of Dr. Khalil Suleiman and the wounding of
three of our colleagues - Dr. Mahmoud Saadi, Taher Samuri, and Mohammad
Alaweh - the Israeli Occupation Forces began an incursion into Tulkarm. As
usual, ambulances headed out to help those who had been wounded and those
who had died, to try and transport them.

I headed out to Tulkarm in my ambulance with a colleague of mine from Jenin.
Within an hour of our arrival, we began coordinating out efforts with the
ICRC, and we made contact with the Israelis so that we could reach the many
people who had been wounded, and the many dead.

After hearing that a car had been blown-up by an Israeli tank near the
entrance to the refugee camp of Tulkarm, I headed toward the camp together
with another ambulance from Tulkarm. We were stopped by an Israeli tank that
tried to chase us away - it began firing in the air with its machine gun.

At that point, we thought that they just wanted us to stop the ambulances;
they were firing warning shots so that we would stop the ambulances in front
of the tank to be searched. That was their normal operating procedure, that
was how it had always happened in the past.

When both ambulances stopped, the tank approached us and began firing with
its heavy guns at the two ambulances. My colleague, the driver of the other
ambulance, Ibrahim Assad, was killed, he was martyred, and I was seriously
injured.

That same day in Tulkarm, only moments before we were shot, an Israeli tank
attacked and drove over a UNRWA ambulance, killing the medic inside. This is
just one of the many stories and travails that ambulance drivers have been
through.

~~~

Among the many hardships faced by PRCS ambulances in transporting the
wounded and the ill is the holding of ambulances. I experienced this myself
with a colleague when we were trying to transport a wounded man to a
hospital in Nablus from Jenin.

After we passed through two, three, four, five checkpoints on our way to
Nablus (to put it in context the trip from Jenin to Nablus is only a 50 km
trip), two Israeli tanks stopped us at the western entrance to Nablus after
we had dropped off our patient at one of the hospitals.

The soldiers searched the ambulance and found that there was no wounded
person inside. We informed them that we had transported our wounded patient
to a hospital in Nablus, and that we were on our way back to Jenin. They
asked us to take our clothes off, and made us lie on the ground. They began
to hit us and bring dogs about us. [In Muslim culture, dogs are considered
humiliating and unclean animals that should not be close to you]. They
humiliated us in this way from ten at night until six the following morning.

~~~

Another incident occurred during clashes between Palestinian children in
Nablus and the Israeli army. The children were throwing stones at the
Israeli army, and a group of Israeli soldiers were firing at the Palestinian
children. While we were passing through the area in our ambulance, several
of the soldiers began to surround the ambulance and took it over. They made
us get out of the ambulance and onto the ground. We were placed right next
to their position, next to the area where the soldiers had taken cover, so
that the rocks being thrown by the Palestinian children would land on us.

The Israeli soldiers took our ambulance and began driving it so that they
could move around more freely in a PRCS ambulance for their own purposes.
They did this for about one hour before a representative for the ICRC came
and demanded that the Israeli army return the ambulance.

** Translated by Mohammed Loubani

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