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For Gaza patients, uncertainty over Israeli permits is a matter of life and death

Sudilovsky, Judith
http://www.972mag.com/gaza-medical-permit-regime-blockade/

Date Written:  04/08/2020
Year Published:  2020  
Resource Type:  Article

Israel's permit regime has become even more arduous for Palestinian patients since the PA halted coordination, with rights groups trying to fill the vacuum.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

In a joint letter to the Israeli Defense Minister, Attorney General, and COGAT on July 19, Gisha, PHR-I, Adalah, Hamoked, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called on Israel to immediately lift travel restrictions that were “imposed under the guise of the pandemic” and demanded that Israel “admit travel applications for all needs” even without coordination with the PA. Using the PA’s decision as an excuse to stop the permit processes, the letter continued, is a “complete abdication of Israel’s legal responsibilities and obligations.”

The organizations also brought attention to the fact that, in the week of July 5, Israel issued almost 100,000 permits to Palestinians in the West Bank, primarily for laborers, This indicated that the authorities were capable of ensuring the same for Gaza, but were instead exploiting the health crisis to “further entrench the severe closure it has imposed on Gaza,” the letter argued, while allowing Palestinians into Israel according to its own needs.

For medical patients in Gaza, the permit regime’s delays and rejections of travel requests — which it did for a third of applications in 2019 — can sometimes be a matter of life and death.

Research by WHO has shown that between 2015 and 2017, Palestinian cancer patients who were initially denied or delayed permits were 1.5 times less likely to survive in the years after they finally received chemotherapy or radiotherapy treatment, compared to patients who were initially approved permits.

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