The darkest week

Palestinian medics are not only risking their lives in the course of their work. They may be becoming targets in the sights of the Israeli army. Graham Usher reports from Ramallah
At about five o'clock last Thursday evening a UN ambulance team answered a call to retrieve a wounded Palestinian man from the outskirts of Tulkarm refugee camp. Israeli soldiers had taken over the camp, so UN officials coordinated the rescue with the local army commander. They received clearance.
The ambulance was held up at an army checkpoint for 20 minutes. By the time it reached the camp the man was dead. It returned to base via hospital and morgue.
At 6.30pm the UN team, together with three Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) ambulances, received another call: four Palestinians had been wounded in a car outside the camp.
Again UN and PRC officials received clearance from the army. "It was the same night, same road, same route, same vehicles, same registration numbers, same signs, same location," said one official.
Five hundred metres from base the ambulances were fired on by the army. One of the PRC drivers, Ibrahim Assad, 40, was killed, hit in the hand while inside the ambulance and then in the head as he tried to climb out.
A UN employee was killed, Kamal Salem, 27, shot in the back in the passenger seat. Salem was not technically a medic. He was a UN school guard seconded into service because no other staff was available at the clinic, said a UN official. "He died helping us out." Six other UN and PRC medics were wounded.
Between them Assad and Salem had 27 years work experience with the PRC and UNRWA. Both were married, with children.
And they are among the five Palestinian medics killed in the last 10 days, as Israel's counter-insurgency campaigns in the occupied territories, particularly against the refugee camps, reached savage new heights.
On 4 March, the head of the PRC emergency ambulance team in Jenin, Dr Khalil Suleiman, 59, went out on a call to rescue a wounded nine-year-old Palestinian girl in Jenin camp.
Witnesses say his ambulance was shot at and then struck by a grenade fired by an Israeli soldier, leaving the vehicle a blazing wreck. Suleiman was killed and five other medics wounded, three from severe burns. The army blocked ambulances and fire brigades from reaching the scene for over an hour, say PRC officials.
On 8 March Dr Ahmed Uthman, head of Yamama hospital in Al-Khader near Bethlehem, was killed in his car by an army tank shell. He had received permission from the army to drive during curfew to collect Palestinian doctors, nurses and medicines, say Palestinian human rights groups. On 7 March a Palestinian Authority ambulance driver was killed in Gaza.
In 26 years of work this was his "darkest week ever," said Rene Kosirnik, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) mission to Israel and the occupied territories. "If there is one category that should be respected in all circumstances and its work facilitated, it is medical work and more specifically emergency medical evacuation," he told a press conference in Ramallah on Friday.
The anger is laced with guilt. The ICRC supports the PRC, whose medics operate under its protection in the occupied territories. The sense of responsibility for their deaths is palpable. "These people lost their lives trying to save the lives of others. We take it very seriously indeed," said Aleksandra Matijevic, an ICRC spokeswoman.
The Israeli army issued statements that in Jenin and Tulkarm Palestinian ambulances tried to "run" checkpoints, and that is why they were fired on.
But the licence that enables soldiers to pull the trigger on medics is the insistent Israeli charge, aired by government and army spokesmen, that Palestinian ambulances freight arms into the refugee camps and ferry wanted Palestinian militants out of them. Israel has never produced a shred of evidence to substantiate the accusation, says Hossam Sharkawi, a PRC doctor in Ramallah.
"We have asked the ICRC to obtain from the army specific instances where our ambulances have transported either arms or fighters. The army has never done so. We, on the other hand, have provided evidence refuting the claims."
This is true, says Matijevic. "We have never received substantive evidence from the army to support the charges. We have tried to establish a dialogue with the army at the highest levels to investigate them." It has rejected all requests, she says. Neither has it retracted the allegations, "except for one occasion."
The ICRC's view is that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies de jure to the occupied territories and that Israel is obliged to ensure the "protection, security and welfare of the population living under occupation." Israel signed the Convention in 1951. As an increasingly "targeted" group, PRC staff want this de jure applicability translated into de facto action.
On 7 March they issued an "urgent appeal," demanding the "prosecution as war criminals" -- those Israeli commanders and soldiers "responsible for the atrocities" in Jenin and Tulkarm. It also wanted international protection as an "on-the-ground presence" for Palestinian medical teams who work in the West Bank and Gaza.
Standing amid the debris of a destroyed Palestinian shelter in Balata Camp, Nablus, UNRWA commissioner- general, Peter Hansen, was asked whether the UN member states should not add protection as well as welfare to his organisation's mandate.
"There is still not enough agreement between the states on this issue," he said. Until there is, "international organisations and UN agencies like ours by their presence here try to provide what protection they can." They do, and some pay for it with their lives. It is no longer enough.
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