|
US move against Hamas funding hits
dialysis
Crackdown cuts off income to kidney failure unit
Section’s 61 patients depend on outside donations
for
bi-weekly treatment
Mohammed Zaatari
Daily Star correspondent
Lying in a hospital bed, 8-year-old Hanine Shehadeh looks
with confused eyes at the dialysis machine that is connected
to her body. The equipment could soon be taken away as
a result of the recent US decision to shut down all Hamas-linked
institutions.
“I want to live like the children of my age, what
have I done to be deprived of my treatment? I ask (US
President George W.) Bush and the American people what
have I done so that they sentence me to death?” she
asks.
Like 60 other Palestinians who suffer from kidney failure,
Hanine has to undergo dialysis three times a week at the
Hamshari Hospital’s dialysis department, or face
certain death.
The United States government closed down a US-based Arab
association that was financed by an American citizen of
Palestinian origin, Hussein Tabari. Tabari has been transferring
$10,000 monthly to the dialysis section through the association
since 1996.
The dialysis section at the hospital, which is part of
the Palestinian Red Crescent, has stopped receiving its
patients, aged between 7 and 83 years, starting Monday
due to the lack of funds.
The 61 patients cannot afford to pay for the dialysis
sessions since the cost of each session ranges from $90
to $100 and each patient needs at least two sessions per
week.
Mahmoud Hussein Abboud, 63, who has been undergoing dialysis
for 18 months, said: “We are on the verge of death,
we wait for death everyday because we cannot afford to
pay the expenses of the treatment.”
Abboud, who comes from Beirut twice a week, said he can
barely afford the transportation fee.
Palestinian sources told The Daily Star that Lebanon’s
commander of President Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction
in Lebanon, Sultan Abul-Ainayn, charged Palestinian Liberation
Organization representative in Sidon, Khaled Aref, with
preparing a report on the dialysis department to submit
to Arafat.
And despite PLO promises to cover dialysis expenses for
one month, until a substitute is provided, patients staged
a sit-in outside the hospital Monday and called on international
humanitarian organizations to come to their aid.
Protesters raised banners reading: “Have diabetes
and dialysis patients become terrorists in the eyes of
President Bush?” and, “We say to the US administration
that we are patients and we need treatment. We are not
terrorists.”
The secretary-general of the Palestinian Popular Committees
in Sidon, Abed Maqdah, who participated in the protest,
listened to the patients, including Hajja Jamila Tahish,
who in addition to her need of dialysis is blind and suffers
from diabetes and osteoporosis.
She said: “I can’t see, how can I be a terrorist?
US President George Bush is unjust and I hope he becomes
blind because he has treated a lot of people unfairly.”
The chief of the dialysis department at the hospital,
Ahmad Jandawi, urged all local and international humanitarian
associations to swiftly act on behalf of the patients
at the hospital, especially since the UN Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA) will not cover any of the department’s
expenses, adding that any Lebanese patient can get a dialysis
treatment for free at the expense of the Health Ministry.
Jandawi said the department receives patients from all
refugee camps in Lebanon, and that 600 dialysis sessions
take place monthly at the hospital.
The media officer of the Palestinian Popular Committees
in Sidon’s camps, Samir Joumaa, said, shutting down
humanitarian and social associations that provide Palestinians
with services aim to exert more pressure on the Palestinian
people to accept “unjust solutions that the US administration
and Israel are trying to impose.”
A member of the Palestinian Popular Committee in Sidon,
Adnan Rifai, said the associations that Bush ordered to
be closed down provided medical care to needy patients,
“and not to any political or military organization.”
| 
