Shortage of medicines in Gaza

Ma’an - GAZA CITY – Tamer liked football and won a bronze medal twice in school competitions. Today, he lies on a hospital bed at Gaza City’s Ash-Shifa Hospital.

The 14-year-old's hands and feet are tied together with four sacks of water weighing one kg each. This is temporary until he undergoes surgery in five days.

He's from Al-Yarmouk in Gaza City. On his way back home Thursday, thinking of his mother’s omelets, he crossed the road carelessly. A speeding car hit him breaking his left thigh bone and tearing his school bag. The bag was donated as well as his clothes, and his father can’t afford to replace them.

To complicate the situation even more, says Tamer’s mother, doctors have not tested Tamer, and it is only nurses who take care of him. They ask his mother to by medicine from pharmacies outside the Strip "because the hospital is short of even bandages, medical gauze, and pain killers."

Next Tuesday, orthopedic surgeons will attempt to resent a broken bone, and if that does not work, he will be taken to hospital in Israel.

On top of all this, the car which hit Tamer had no license and no insurance, and the driver can’t afford to cover expenses. However, he paid 500 NIS, which is enough for one night in hospital. The driver’s family wants Tamer to be back home by any means because they can’t afford to help the driver with the heavy expenses.

Ma’an asked the Hamas government’s director of pharmaceuticals Muneer Al-Barsh about the situation.

He said the Gaza Strip’s hospitals had more than 7 million pills of Diclophen painkillers, which is 5 million overstock, as they only need 2 million. He said doctors who work in public hospitals and medical centers prescribe this pill, but private doctors can prescribe others, but the ministry does not have to pay for that.

“Those who want to pamper themselves choose to buy other kinds of painkillers,” he said.

As for other requirements, Al-Barsh asserted that hospitals in the besieged Strip are short of 100 types of medicines and 160 types of medical requirements such as cotton, gauze and other stuff.

He explained that the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health was mostly responsible for that shortage because in 2008 they delivered to the only 48 percent of the needed medical equipment; in 2009, they sent 50 percent and in 2010, only 37 percent has been delivered. He noted that the World Bank pays for 100 percent of equipment costs.

Gaza faces a political crisis, and the first to suffer are always average civilians.

“These requirements should be delivered as needed so that we can give them to patients. There is no problem with painkillers, but rather with basic medicines and medical requirements,” Al-Barsh asserted.

Asked about the tons of medicines and medical equipment the Gaza Strip receives through solidarity activists who keep arriving to the Gaza Strip, he said, “They can’t bring every medication and medical device for all 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip.”

Video: Christians in Gaza urge Israel to stop displacing Palestinians

Following a meeting in the Vatican, Roman Catholic Bishops have urged Israel to stop displacing Palestinians, saying that religion is not a basis for settlement building.

The bishops were attending a summit on the plight of Christians in the Middle East and the statement will strike a chord in Gaza, which has one of the oldest Christian communities.

The Greek Orthodox Church conmmunity in the territory is just one of several Christian communities in the Gaza Strip that are less obvious than their counterparts in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

US 'deeply disappointed' with Israel's new settlement construction plan

Haaretz - The United States said it was "deeply disappointed" on Monday by Israel's announcement of a plan to build over 1,000 new Jewish homes beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem.

A Palestinian woman walks nearby the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in east Jerusalem, Monday, Nov. 8, 2010. (AP)

"We were deeply disappointed by the announcement of advance planning for new housing units in sensitive areas of East Jerusalem. It is counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties," said U.S. State Department Spokesman Philip J. Crowley.

Israel's announcement of its program which will allow some 1,300 new housing units to be built beyond the Green Line could prove to be an embarrassment to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently in the United States.

"We have long urged both parties to avoid actions which could undermine trust, including in Jerusalem, and will continue to work to resume direct negotiations to address this and other final-status issues," Crowley said.

Ruth Yosef, who chairs the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee, published over the weekend details of a program that will allow 930 housing units to be built in the Har Homa C area, with another 48 units in Har Homa B. An additional 320 units are planned for Ramot, also beyond the Green Line.

The pro-Israel lobby J Street also issued a statement criticizing the new building permits, saying that "J Street is profoundly disappointed that the Israeli government has chosen this moment to announce yet another large round of construction in East Jerusalem."

The American-Jewish lobby urged Israel to delay any further construction over the Green Line "until negotiations over the border have been finalized, in the interest of its long-term security and survival as a democracy and as the homeland of the Jewish people."

U.S. doesn’t support real democracy in Middle East

Ma'an - Democracy in the Middle East continues to be a hugely popular topic of discussion. Its virtues are tirelessly praised by rulers and oppositions alike, by intellectuals and ordinary people, by political prisoners and their prison guards. Yet, in actuality, it also remains an illusion, if not a front to ensure the demise of any real possibility of public participation in decision-making.

Bahrain was the latest Arab country to hold free and fair elections. It managed a reasonable voter turnout of 67 percent. The opposition also did very well, winning 45 percent of the seats. In terms of fairness and transparency, the Bahraini elections could serve as an excellent example of how ‘things are changing’ in the Middle East. More, they might provide Western leaders such as US President Barack Obama an opportunity to commend the contribution of American guidance to 'progress' in the region.

In actual fact, nothing is changing – except for the insistence by some that it is. Arab governments have made two important discoveries in the last decade.

The first discovery is that US interests cannot peacefully co-exist with true democracies in the region. Egypt had a rude awaking in 2005, when Muslim Brotherhood candidates won a fifth of the votes, if not more. This was followed by the unmatched democratic revolution in Palestine when Hamas won the majority of the vote. The aftermath of both of these events was enough to remind both Arabs and the US of the folly of their so-called democracy project.

The second realization is that Arabs are not judged by the genuineness of their democracy; rather, the success of their democratic experiences is judged on the basis of how well they can serve and protect US interests. Since the democracy radar is measured by Washington, Arab countries deemed lacking in democratic reforms are often cited as promising and fledgling democracies in Congressional reports or White House statements. Countries deemed hostile to US economic and political interests are remorselessly shunned, as if their experiments with democracy could never yield anything of worth or consideration.

These two realizations led to a superficial change of course, forming a new trend that Shadi Hamid, writing in Foreign Policy, refers to as “free but unfair -- and rather meaningless -- election.”

Free elections are known to be the cornerstone of true democracy. Thus by giving the impression of freedom, automatically one tends to conclude fairness. But fairness is nowhere to be found, for if it truly exists then change becomes possible and is likely to follow. Those who have followed the new democratic experiences of some Arab countries will have observed that they have also been defined by the same political stagnation of the pre-democracy years.

American journalist Sydney J. Harris once wrote "Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be." If Harris is correct, then whatever is underway in the Middle East is anything but democracy. Although new parliamentarians are elected, new faces flash on television, and an increasing number of women are paraded along with their male colleagues following each election, the powers that be remain unchanged, unhinged and truly unchallenged.

Most polls, whether conducted by Arab or non-Arab pollsters, indicate that the vast majority of Arab people view democracy in very positive terms. But the plot has truly thickened in recent years, when on the one hand democracy has become a household name in much of the Middle East, and not one ruler or government contests its virtues. Yet, no true democracy has in fact actualized in any shape or form.

Have Middle Eastern ruling elites figured out the democracy trick, the great con of our time? Have they realized that democracy in the Middle East is only what the White House says it can be?

Israel has mastered this very trick since the day of its inception. This is what Hasan Afif El-Hasan argues in his new and very instructive book, Is the Two-State Solution Already Dead? "The identity of the Israelis in their legal documents and ID cards is expressed in terms of their group religious affiliation as 'Jewish,' 'Muslim,' 'Christian,' 'Bahai,' 'Durzi,' etc., where all privileges are conferred by the state on the Jews by virtue of being Jews, thus making Israel a religio-ethnocracy rather than a liberal democracy."

Israel's unique democracy is in fact getting more unique, as non-Jewish citizens of Israel are subjected to increasing levels of legal harassment and are constantly asked to jump through all sorts of political hoops to prove their loyalty to the Jewish state. Still, clever and persistent Israel has managed to present itself to the world at large, Arabs included, as being a model democracy.

This was and continues to be the original democracy con in the Middle East. It took some Arab governments decades to catch up and also present themselves as democratic, whatever the reality on the ground. This is not your everyday democracy scheme. It is particularly devious because it can boast of being free, fair and transparent - and the numbers would actually attest to that - but the political structure would still be construed in such a way that the freely elected parliaments are blocked from legislating effectively to challenge the powers that be. If any legislation is allowed to pass, through, say, unelected upper houses, and approved by the ultimate ruler (both usually serving as an insurance system against elected parliaments), it tends to be unimportant and largely decorative.

Since democracy is always a work in progress, for no country can claim to be perfectly democratic, then Middle East governments can always use this idea to justify their own shortcomings. Expectedly, the US tends to honor that, bestowing praise on their friends, and condemning their enemies - the former for courageously taking on democratic initiatives and the latter for failing the democracy test.

The great democracy con would not succeed, were it not for the fact that many players, including the US, are so invested in its success. As for the ordinary people, who are eager to see their rights respected, freedoms honored, and political horizons expanded, well, they can always vote – even if only their vote actually counts for nothing, and only further validates the very system they are trying to change.

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story

2148 homes raided, 403 detained by Israel in October

Ma'an - RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Detainees' Affairs said Israeli forces detained 403 Palestinians and raided 2148 homes across the West Bank during October.

In a report released Saturday, the ministry said Israeli soldiers intimidated and assaulted residents, destroying the contents of homes during the raids.

Of those detained, 95 percent had been assaulted in front of their families and were beaten en route to detention centers in Israeli military jeeps.

Among those detained, 130 were minors. Most of the minors detained were from Hebron and Jerusalem, the ministry said, adding that they were mostly sentenced to between one and six months, and ordered to pay large fines.

Sixty children from Jerusalem and one child from Hebron were placed under house arrest. In cases where a child broke the conditions of house arrest, a family member was arrested, the report said.

Most detainees were interrogated in Israeli settlements before they were transferred to official detention centers. The ministry documented 50 cases of raids inside the prisons. Under the pretext of searching for cell phones, guards used tear gas and sticks to beat prisoners and destroyed their personal belongings, the ministry said.

Israeli rights groups say Palestinians tortured in Israeli detention

On Tuesday, two Israeli rights groups released a report accusing Israel of "state sanctioned ill-treatment of interrogees" in at least one detention facility in Petah Tikva, in central Israel.

According to the joint B'Tselem and HaMoked report, testimonies from 121 detainees "indicate a clear pattern of activity by the authorities," which "constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment."

According to the collected testimony, "violations include cruel detention conditions in sealed cells, in isolation and disgraceful hygienic conditions, continuous cuffing of detainees’ hands in the interrogation room in a way that makes it impossible for them to move, sleep deprivation, and other methods that harm the detainees physically and mentally.

The report noted that "the use of any one of these means, certainly their combined use, constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and in some instances, torture. All are strictly forbidden under international law and Israeli law."

Further, the groups said testimonies suggested that children were treated no differently than adults by soldiers and detention center authorities, despite their legal status as minors.

US denies support for UN Palestinian statehood bid

Ma'an - WASHINGTON – A US State Department official denied a host of rumors on the progress of the peace process Friday, including reports that Washington would back a bid for a Palestinian state presented to the UN Security Council.

Mark Toner, deputy State Department spokesman, told reporters at a daily news conference in Washington that "anything that might affect getting those – getting both parties back into direct negotiations, we would discourage frankly," referring to questions about the potential US support for the move.

As talks stalled in late September, reports in the Israeli press suggested that US mediators had promised to block action for a Palestinian state at the Security Council as part of a package of guarantees in exchange for a promise to halt Israeli settlement construction on occupied Palestinian lands.

No deal was made, however, and talks stalled as Americans went to the polls for the midterm elections, the results of which were interpreted as a blow to the administration of President Barack Obama, with many questioning what the Republican shift in the House of Representatives would mean for the peace process.

Toner made clear in his statements to the press on Friday, however, that Mideast peace was still a priority for the administration, citing upcoming meetings with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, scheduled to be in the United States at the same time as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The official would not confirm reports from Chief PLO Negotiator Saeb Erekat, who said Thursday that mediator George Mitchell had asked for two weeks to try to convince Israel to freeze settlements.