Medical Initiative
For the Benefit of
The Children of Palestine
Ear Surgery for Palestinian Children
By Dr. Ibrahim K. Ladaa
Message from Nablus, September 5, 2003
Dear Colleagues,
At a quarter past midnight the Israeli
soldiers, making use of the disguise of a vegetable transporter, burst into the forecourt
of the government hospital in Rafidia. Because
there was not much to do, only a few employees were standing at the entrance for emergency
cases. The soldiers burst into the hospital with very modern weapons, automatic rifles
installed with laser pointers, and forced all the hospital staff to go into one room by
aiming the laser pointers directly at their heads. While they were crammed together and
guarded by two soldiers, the other soldiers made their way through the corridors of the
hospital towards the intensive care unit.
Two young men between 20 and 25 years old
were lying there. Two days earlier, they had
been seriously injured while being pursued by the Israeli military. One of them had had an operation lasting several
hours. The bullet had come from the right-
abdominally/thoracically - and damaged his liver, his pancreas and the left kidney. For
three days he had to be administered artificial respiration. The other young patient
had thoracic problems because of a wound in his right arm which had caused a nerve
injury; he also had to be administered artificial respiration for
almost two days. On
the day on which the condition of the two had become a little more stable and they were
able to manage without artificial respiration, they were kidnapped during the night. During the raid one of the hospital staff managed to
inform the director of the hospital by telephone without being noticed.
Although the director lived less than ten
minutes away everything was over by the time he arrived.
At the meeting on the next morning the
mood of the colleagues was a mixture of anger and impotence. Several suggestions were made
and talked about a lot. One of the surgeons expressed his concern about whether the
patients’ health could withstand the kidnapping. Another
one calmed him down and said there would surely be colleagues of ours in the Israeli army.
Other colleagues for their part suggested
going on strike for ten minutes, demonstrating in front of the hospital and informing the
press. This proposal wasn’t accepted either; several doctors were of the opinion that
it wouldn’t help since the world is on the side of the mighty, nobody wants to listen
to us and for the western world we are all terrorists. The telephone rang, the director
told us it was the press and our ministry of health had already sent a letter of protest
to the UNO and the international press. The secretary appeared and announced that the
operating areas for both in- and out-patients were full of people who had come long
distances and wanted to be back home in time before the nightly curfew began. We all stood
up and each of us went back to his place in order to do his work and his duty.
New diagnoses: a medical certificate from
surgery contained the following description of patients who had been sent to me. The 19-year-old patient was struck by an Israeli
soldier on the front of his head with a piece of wood with a nail in it, hitting his
right eyeball in the process. I had to decide if it was a case for the ear, nose and
throat department. The diagnosis was given under the abbreviation HBS. I began to think intensively hard what HBS could
possibly mean.
My medical training is German but I am
well acquainted with specialist English literature. I didn’t want to make a fool of
myself in front of the sister and the patient; after I was been informed by his friends,
who were standing around, what had happened I diagnosed through the examination and the
X-ray pictures that everything was all right concerning ear, nose and throat. I transferred him to the ophthalmology department.
(Later I heard that his vision was all right and that the injury only pertained to the
fatty tissue of the eyeball.)
I made a note of the diagnosis and made my
way to the accident ward to ask about the meaning of HBS. In
the accident ward cubicles, which are separated by curtains, there was a lot of activity. I found the register in front of me on the table,
looked through it and found that this diagnosis was often recorded. Almost every fourth patient was diagnosed with HBS
or HBSS. I became hot and cold. As old as I
was I didn’t know what was going on. When a young colleague came past I asked him
directly what HBS might mean. He looked at me in astonishment and said, “You are not
from here.” I replied “Yes, I have
been away for a very long time.” He
explained to me that they were the abbreviations for HIT BY SOLDIERS and HIT BY SOLDIERS AND SETTLERS. Now I understood everything; 25% of the patients of
the emergency clinics are given this diagnosis. Every
third Palestinian has been in an Israeli prison, two thirds of the people have fled and
the three million who have stayed are surrounded by an eight-meter-high wall on all sides.
But the worst of all is TIME, the time
which the Israelis steal from the Palestinians. A whole people spends its time making
detours over mountains and fields day in and day out in order to avoid the Israeli
checkpoints, to get to their place of work, to give birth in the hospital, to...,
to...., to........ .
Stealing the Palestinian people’s
time is the worst and most cunning thing that the state of Israel can do to the
Palestinians. Not the expulsion, not the
stealing of land, not the terror, not summary executions without any trial at all and so
on; it is the stolen TIME. It kills
everything, it causes stagnation, it allows no possibility for anyone to think of anything
else; it creates a people that is no longer able to do or be anything, not even guest
workers in Israel!
After six weeks I had to leave Nablus. From an emotional point of view I could have stayed
longer. I came to know a lot of people during
these six weeks and we had got on well together.
But duty calls - cest la vie -
and I carried out 50 micro surgical operations
during this time. The average age of the patients was 17.5. There were more girls, women
respectively, than boys and men, the proportion was 3:2, that is, the majority were girls
who suffered from cholesteatomas, tumors in the ears.
If you can draw conclusions from this is
another matter. I wouldn’t try it because the total number is too small to say
anything.
All 50 operations passed by without
serious complications. In two of them it was a case of a brain abscess in the rear
cranial cavity. In 80% of the cases we are
talking about the well-known bone corrosion tumor, the cholesteatoma. I cannot say what the situation is regarding the
improvement of the hearing ability; it depends very much on the starting point after the
treatment. I hope that I have been able to teach the colleagues something in this regard.
At any rate, on my departure they showed that they were very satisfied and had learned a
lot.
On Thursday I took my leave of Nablus.
There were still three operations ahead of me. With great difficulty I had found an
ambulance of the ‘Health Union’ the driver of which had agreed to take me out of
Nablus. The curfew was in effect for the second week running. In the dispute, the occupier, armed with the most
modern western weapons, faces the occupied, empty-handed or only with a stone in his hand,
but with the determination to live in freedom in his own land one day.
Nablus can look back on 9000 years of
history. It lies between the two mountains
Ebal and Jerzim. One of the oldest communities
in the world lives there, the Samaritans. There are about 400 people and they believe in
the first five books of Moses. Live and let live is also the mission of the inhabitants of
Nablus. They refuse to be enslaved by others;
that is already written down in their history. In
Arabic, or in the vernacular, Nablus is called JABAL AL NAAR, the fiery mountain.
That stems from the time when the area was
occupied by the Ottoman Turks for 400 years. At that time the Turks - in order to
break the resistance of the population - had burnt down all the woods surrounding Nablus
so that they could get a better view of the town. Now
the Israelis don’t have to do anything else in this respect although they have
uprooted a lot of trees, for security reasons, they say. The Israeli military
installed many western, modern surveillance systems to watch over the people day and
night, to determine wherever they are at the moment, and to be able to murder at any time
from a distance of several kilometers. On the
peaks of these two mountains you can see the aerials of the surveillance systems.
At 12 o’clock, while I was operating,
a sister came and told me that the ambulance driver had come earlier, because heavy
Israeli tank units were moving towards Nablus. I told her to give him a cup of coffee and
to request that he should wait for half an hour. After a while, the sister came back and
explained that the driver had gone. I continued the operation and said that I would stay a
further night. But after another period of time the ambulance came back with three wounded
boys who had been hit in the shoulders and legs by live ammunition. I had finished my operation and we set off at once.
We had to go through the centre of the town where the great conflict was taking place. It
was an adventure, the driver drove like a racing driver. He found his way between stones
and rocks, between Israeli tanks and armored vehicles. He
fought his way through the narrow streets, several times he had to hold out in a side
street or wait in small streets until the Israeli tanks had gone past. I had fastened my seat-belt tightly and hoped that
the tires would stand the strain. Finally we drove off towards Ramallah and left JABAL AL
NAAR behind.
Ibrahim K. Lada’a