A Palestinian woman who was refused access to an ambulance at an Israel Defense Forces checkpoint died in her village in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a Palestinian doctor and relatives said. Local witnesses said the husband of Fawziya Qabb pleaded with soldiers at the Jarushiya checkpoint near the town of Tul Karm to let his wife get to an ambulance waiting to take her to a Palestinian hospital but they ignored him. Source said that troops had sealed off the area in the northern West Bank as they normally do make like hard for Palestinians. Local witnesses and Palestinian security sources said the Israeli heightened state of alert soon after the assassination of Imad Mugniyah had forced thousands of residents to wait at checkpoints in the pouring rain. Qabb's relatives from the village of Deir al-Ghosoon close to Tul Karm said they called the ambulance but soldiers did not allow it through the checkpoint to pick up the 67-year-old. "I asked the officer to let us cross but he refused," husband Mahmoud Yousef Qabb said. Mahmoud said that after failing to persuade the soldiers for 20 minutes, he took his ailing wife back to the village doctor who failed in his efforts to save her life. "She had suffered a stroke and needed urgent hospital attention. She might have lived if she had reached hospital," village doctor Abdel-Fattah al-Darak said. Qabb said his wife, a heart patient, was in good condition after being discharged from hospital in Tul Karm earlier on Thursday. Human rights groups say they have recorded several cases of Palestinian patients who have died because of delays at IDF checkpoints since the start of the Palestinian uprising in 2000. Israel says it allows humanitarian cases through the checkpoints but with so many dying that is hardly the case. Israel says they are needed to protect its citizens against Palestinian suicide bombers but more and more it's seen for what it is |
imposed on Palestinians by Zionist Israel.
0 Have Your Say!:
Post a Comment