Real Lives
West Bank ambulance crews now plan every route around Israeli gates
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The job used to be a straight line. A call comes in, a crew of two or three takes the vehicle, and the shortest road wins.
In the occupied West Bank the shortest road is now a hypothesis. More than 930 gates, checkpoints and other obstacles cut the territory's roads, by the United Nations count, and a paramedic leaving a station at Nablus or Hebron sets out already knowing that the route may close in front of him while he drives it.
What the trade looks like now#
Crews plan in alternates. Before a vehicle moves, someone has worked out the second road and the third, checked which iron gates were shut that morning, and decided whether to send the ambulance to the patient or to arrange a transfer at a junction — patient carried from one vehicle to another on a verge, because the vehicle that started cannot finish.
They also plan for the possibility that the ambulance itself is the target.
On 7 August two medics of the Palestine Red Crescent Society were injured when settlers attacked their ambulance as they tried to evacuate a man wounded in a settler assault at Khalayel al-Louz, south of Bethlehem.
On 17 August a Red Crescent crew carrying a patient out of Tel Rumeida in Hebron had its windows smashed with stones and its crew pepper-sprayed; two paramedics were hurt and the ambulance was taken out of service. The following day Al Jazeera published footage of settler children attacking an ambulance in the West Bank.
Yesterday at Qusra, the town's mayor Abdel Azim Wadi said an ambulance that reached the scene of a settler attack was held, and the wounded were treated in the field.
The numbers the institutions keep#
The World Health Organization's surveillance recorded 37 attacks on health care in the West Bank in July, against eight in June and a monthly average of about ten through the first half of the year, bringing the year's running total to 98.
Its tally of what those attacks touched includes 83 health transport vehicles and 11 health facilities, with 33 people injured and four killed. In the first six months of the year the same surveillance documented 50 separate cases of medical care delayed.
On 5 August Human Rights Watch published its own finding under a title that is also the crews' working problem: delaying Palestinian ambulances risks lives.
Why this is a trade story and not only a rights story#
Emergency medicine is measured in minutes, and the crews know the numbers better than anyone quoting them. A cardiac arrest, a haemorrhage, an obstructed labour: each has a window, and the window does not extend because a gate is closed.
What the crews have built in response is a body of craft that no medical school teaches — route memory across a hundred villages, the negotiation at the checkpoint conducted while a patient deteriorates behind you, the handover on the roadside, the decision about when to abandon the vehicle and carry.
It is skilled work performed under conditions designed by someone else, and the people who do it turn up for the next shift. That, and not the statistics, is the reason the West Bank still has an ambulance service at all.
