Friday, June 02, 2006
News Flash: Hamas Wants Little Girl To Die
...a little Palestinian girl, that is, stricken with cancer, in desperate need of a bone-marrow transplant -- one that Palestinian hospitals are not equipped to perform.
Were she an Israeli, costs would be largely borne by her medical insurance. Instead, an Israeli hospital prepared to perform the operation, and ask the Palestinian Authority to foot the bill. Anticipating refusal, the hospital agreed to pay a large chunk of the $58,000 cost itself... and the Peres Center for Peace, an Israeli organization, agreed to match that.
So the PA would only need to pay $10,000 in the end, not $58,000, due to the generosity of Israeli doctors and philanthropists. But that's worth it to save a little girl's life, right?
Wrong. The PA, now controlled by Hamas, refused to pay the money, because "it would be seen as cooperating with the Zionist enemy". It was left to the Peres Center to find the remaining $10,000... to save the life of a Palestinian girl, whose own government didn't think it worth the bother.
This should be an astounding human-interest story, one that would generate headlines around the world. So far it hasn't; let's hope that it does. This is a story that deserves to be heard.
(hat tip: Solomonia.com, who reprinted it from Treppenwitz. The original story so far has seen press only on Arutz 7, in a story dated May 25. I have not seen an English translation yet, but I'll happily prepare one if there's interest.)
Actually, the title of this post notwithstanding, this isn't really big news, as commenters at Treppenwitz have pointed out. It's not new for Israel to help Palestinians who cannot, or will not, help themselves; nor is it new for the Palestinian Authority to endanger its own people by refusing to do business with Israel. (Heck, it's not news for the PA to endanger Palestinians, period, whether Israel is involved or not.)
So this isn't new. But you'd think that newspapers would find it interesting.
