Behind the Wall - 'Medical Conditions caused by Political Decisions'

by Rich Wiles *

On Christmas Eve in 1952, a Swiss priest called Father Schnydrig was on his
way to Mass at the Church of the Nativity. He had come to Palestine to
celebrate in the birthplace of Jesus. He walked past a huge area filled with
tents and saw a man attempting to bury a child. This was Dehaishah Refugee
Camp. The man was digging in the mud to create a makeshift grave for his own
son. His son had literally frozen to death. Father Schnydrig began to
question his own place in Bethlehem and wondered how he could be in the city
to celebrate the birthplace of Jesus whilst children were suffering so much
within a kilometer of the church. Upon returning to Europe he began to
fundraise and soon opened Caritas Children's Hospital in Bethlehem. In 1978
Caritas opened a new building, it now has excellent facilities. Conditions
at the hospital have improved greatly from an initial fourteen beds in the
mid 1950's to being able to treat over 34,000 babies and children in 2006.
Life has also changed greatly in Bethlehem over this time. Dehaishah's
refugees now live in houses instead of tents. Bethlehem itself is now an
Occupied city.

Earlier this year a man walked into Caritas Hospital carrying a small baby
in his arms from a refugee camp. The child's feet were blue, they were
frozen.this time the child's life was saved.

Palestine in 2007 is geographically hardly recognizable from Palestine in
1952. Go back a further five years and 'historical Palestine' still existed.
Now only around 12% of 'historical Palestine' is accessible to Palestinians.
Caritas cannot even cater to all of this 12%. Children from Jenin, Nablus,
and other cities in the northern section of the West Bank cannot get to the
hospital due to travel restrictions, checkpoints, and the series of
Bantustans which the Occupation is dividing the country into. Because of
this Caritas can only treat children and babies from the southern West bank,
the areas around Bethlehem and Al Khalil. Despite this massive reduction in
its catchment area, last year saw the largest ever number of patients
treated at the hospital.

The effects of the Occupation are varied and widespread. Children injured by
the IOF are not brought to Caritas as it has no emergency casualty unit,
instead they are taken to state hospitals in Bethlehem. But saying that, a
very high percentage of all children in the hospital have conditions which
in some way relate to the political situation.

Walking around the hospital it is hard not to be impressed by the facilities
and the standard of care, but another very striking thing is the size of
most of the children. Children suffering from serious malnutrition are
regularly brought into the hospital, but as I am taken around the hospital
by some of the many dedicated staff they begin to explain to me about F.T.T.
- Failure To Thrive. The majority of the children at Caritas are not from
the cities of Bethlehem or Al Khalil but from the refugee camps and villages
in the area. The social and environmental and social conditions in these
areas are much lower than inside the cities. Poverty levels are higher, and
subsequently diet suffers, heating is insufficient through the winter, and
access to clean drinking water is also a major problem.One tiny child
catches my attention as her huge brown eyes gaze at me inquisitively. After
covering myself with a face mask, a gown, and gloves to
prevent spread of infection, a doctor takes me over to meet her:

"Lama is from Al Khadr village. She is ten months old but has the growth
parameters of a baby less than four months old. Her mother had no milk to
feed her with so she simply couldn't grow. Her parents haven't been here in
a month now."

A lot of the children are suffering from gastro-intestinal problems, which
can manifest itself as sickness and diarrhea. Such problems are common in
children worldwide but in Palestine, as in many parts of the unprivileged
world, children are dying from such conditions. Parents do not have the
money to pay for hospital care so are often delaying going to hospital until
it is almost too late. And as another doctor explained in some cases it is
too late by the time children reach the hospital:

"A few months ago a man brought his son in. They had no money at all and
felt ashamed to beg for help so they put off seeking treatment hoping the
condition would improve with time. Eventually the family got very desperate
as their child deteriorated and they took him to a Government hospital. When
they got there the hospital couldn't treat him as all doctors were striking,
and they were sent here. The child died within a few hours of getting here,
it was just too late."

This child died from acute gastro-enteritis, he was just six months old. Had
he been taken to hospital earlier he could have been treated successfully.

Since the international blockade on Palestine began last year, imposed by
the world's leaders of so-called ' freedom and democracy', staff at Caritas
have found the situation has deteriorated greatly, and at an alarming rate.
Doctors at state hospitals had not been getting paid and eventually took up
strike action in protest so many more children were getting passed on to
Caritas. Parents have no money so their diets and those of their children
have suffered greatly. One child was brought in suffering severe vitamin
B-12 deficiency which is unusual in babies here according to the doctors at
Caritas:

"B-12 is found in meat and vegetables which very young babies do not eat.
Her father was a policeman so had not been getting paid since the blockade
began, he could not provide food for his family, so his wife during
pregnancy had lived on not much more than bread and black tea. By the time
she gave birth she herself was suffering severe B-12 deficiency and as she
began breastfeeding this was made more acute in her new born baby as there
was no B-12 in her milk. We see this a lot - mothers who cannot produce good
milk because of their own dietary suffering which is in turn passed onto
their children."

Many of the children here suffer from some form of anemia, another condition
directly related to poor nutrition.  One child I saw had 80% iron deficiency
anemia. Iron is vital in the first few months of life for amongst other
things development of IQ and this child has been found to be suffering from
incorrect psychological development as well as physical problems. So these
are some of effects of the policy which Bush and Blair promoted last year
because they didn't like the democratic choice of the Palestinian people:

"We found things got a lot worse after the Intifada began and again since
last year's blockade things have deteriorated greatly. Nutritional care has
suffered a lot. Mothers cannot produce milk so are using powdered milk but
it is being diluted so heavily because of the families poverty levels that
it has virtually no nutritional value. It is also being made with dirty
water."

Another very evident factor at Caritas is a disturbing lack of parents in
the hospital with their children:

"We find this to be another major problem, particularly from the camps and
villages around Al Khalil. This baby here for example is from Yatta (a town
south of Al Khalil). She has Short Bowel Syndrome, a twisted intestine. She
also suffers from various nutritional deficiencies, anemia, and FTT. She has
been with us since just after birth and her parents have not been to see her
in over two months now. Yatta is a very poor town and her parents simply
cannot afford the transport to get here, they have other children to feed at

home..."

Walking around the hospital I see rooms and rooms full of tiny babies
suffering from conditions in some way related to social conditions and
poverty, children whose eyes light up when I walk in at seeing a new face.
Some smile up at me with the beauty of new life, others cry almost
constantly. One baby is so tiny I am sure she must have been born very
prematurely but as we look through her notes we find that in fact she was
born after a full term of pregnancy. She is now four months old but seems no
bigger than a bag of sugar. The doctors go on to tell me of other children
brought in, carried in their fathers arms, carried in like babies, but in
fact these children are not babies but three, four, or five years old. They
simply cannot grow - this is FTT at its most severe.

In the winter, children such as the child described earlier with frozen
feet, are being brought in with temperatures as low as 32 degrees,
particularly from the camps and villages, because their houses have
insufficient heating, or in some cases no heating at all. Not all children
brought into Caritas can be treated at the hospital. The hospital has built
strong links with hospitals inside Israel and some children are sent to
hospitals there if they cannot be treated at Caritas. This is particularly
the case with major operations. But this procedure also faces many problems.
Endless paperwork must be completed and then the child will be put into an
ambulance. but this ambulance is permitted to travel only a few hundred
metres up to Bethlehem checkpoint. It can go no further. It can go no
further because it is Palestinian. Even ambulances are not allowed passage
through the checkpoints to hospitals in Israel irrespective of paperwork. So
at the checkpoint a child will be unloaded from the ambulance and an Israeli
ambulance will wait to collect the child to continue the journey. And once
the child is safely in the hospital inside Israel where are his or her
parents? They are invariably stuck the other side of the Apartheid Wall to
their child, unable to get permission from the Occupation to themselves
visit and care for their sick children during their hospital treatment. In
one recent case from Caritas a baby in an incubator was held up at Bethlehem

Checkpoint for a couple of hours before the soldiers finally allowed him to
be transferred to the waiting Israeli ambulance.

The doctors at Caritas have also, since the start of the Intifada, found
incredibly high numbers of very young children suffering from a rare strain
of cancer behind the eye. They have been unable to pinpoint exactly what is
causing this and it is not being found in neighbouring countries which leads
the doctors to believe it is possibly a chemical toxin being used by the
Occupation. They have been researching the possibility it could be caused by
tear-gas but have so far been unable to categorically prove this theory.
Premature birth and miscarriage as a result of shock caused during IOF
attacks is also widely seen.

The work of all the staff at Caritas Children's Hospital is admirable. The
faces and tiny, weak bodies of the patients are heartbreaking, wanting eyes
looking out of shallow faces pleading for help. Palestine diminishes day by
day. It gets smaller and smaller. It cannot thrive and its children suffer
from a Failure to Thrive. It cannot develop, and its children illustrate
that fact through their continued development of poverty related illnesses.
These are medical conditions caused by political decisions.

*About Rich Wiles

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