Reviews
Personal views

Occupied Territories: entry denied

Last week I left home to work for six weeks as a medical volunteer for the Palestine Red Crescent Society in the Occupied Territories. I have worked before in Palestinian (refugee) communities, both in the Occupied Territories and in Lebanon. So has my wife, Dr Pauline Cutting, who was awarded an OBE for her humanitarian work in the Palestinian refugee camps. I am a primary care doctor, but I am also an advanced trauma life support provider and I have treated war injuries on numerous occasions.


I was handed over to the police and placed in a shabby holding unit at the airport



On 6 May at 3.50 am I arrived on Lufthansa flight LH0690 at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Getting through passport control and security has always been an awkward process, but I have never before been barred from entering.

This time things were different. After passport control came the security people with their barrage of questions. I stated my intentions truthfully: that I had come to work as a doctor in the emergency department of a Palestinian hospital. I had one suitcase full of medical supplies, donated by our district hospital, Ysbyty Gwynedd, and medical books to bring to my Palestinian colleagues. I also had a booklet on the basic rules of international humanitarian law.

But even before my luggage was turned inside out, I was informed that the Interior Ministry had decided to deny me entry for security reasons. I asked if I, a 49 year old father of two teenagers, a general practitioner from North Wales, constituted a security threat against the state of Israel. Clearly I did not, but the denial order stood.

My luggage was then subjected to intense scrutiny. I had to explain the workings of a fundoscope, a peak flow meter, a tympanic thermometer. "What's this?" one of the security people asked. "It is an otoscope. Allow me to demonstrate." I looked into his right ear. It was full of impacted wax. I advised him to see his doctor about it.

They confiscated the battery charger of my brand new digital camera, because they didn't have the right equipment to examine it. The handbooks of the International Red Cross on the treatment of war injuries also raised a few eyebrows.

Then I was handed over to the police and placed in a shabby holding unit at the airport, where I joined two hapless economic migrants from Poland. I studied the graffiti on the walls of the cell. Quite a few of the messages were from people who earlier had been denied entry or deported because of their activities in the Occupied Territories. The most recent one was from a Swede and four Americans. It told me of their arrest in the vicinity of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

To these writings I added my own: "6.5.02. Today I was denied entry because I came to give humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people. My duty as a doctor is to give help to those in need, irrespective of race, nationality, religion, or political beliefs. That includes Palestinians."

After 10 hours in the holding cellno phone call allowedthe police forced me to board a Lufthansa plane that was ready to take off. I struggled to contain my emotions. The cabin crew were very sympathetic and offered me a comfortable seat. As the plane began to climb over the Mediterranean I saw the hazy coast of the Gaza strip towards the south. I should have been there, I thought, and I felt empty.

Ironically, during the flight back to Frankfurt, a passenger collapsed near the toilet. The cabin crew asked for my assistance and of course I agreed to help. The passenger recovered, without problems, from a benign vasovagal collapse.

A fax from Tel Aviv to Lufthansa in Frankfurt stated in black and white that my entry had been denied because of "political/security reasons."

Back home in North Wales I read in the online edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, dated 6 May, that in just over a month 2000 humanitarian aid workers and human rights activists had been barred from entering the country and that 50 had been deported, according to figures from the Interior Ministry. The article states that the interior minister, Eli Yishai, has adopted this as a policy.

The people barred from entering Israel include representatives of charities such as Save the Children and CARE, three United States-funded international aid organisations, a team of Greek humanitarian workers, two Swedish doctors, and even two United Nations humanitarian affairs officers. And now I have been added to their numbers.

The policy to deny humanitarian aid workers access to the Palestinian population is, in my opinion, both a breach of international humanitarian law and an unacceptable practice for a country that declares itself to be open and democratic.

I hope that the British Medical Association will take up this issue with its Israeli counterpart and that the Israeli Medical Association will publicly dissociate itself from the policy of the interior minister and will do the best it can to have it reversed.



Ben Alofs, general practitioner.

Bangor  yma69@dial.pipex.com