Mizan: IOA blackmail Palestinian patients at crossing points

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[ 01/12/2009 - 08:58 PM ]

GAZA, (PIC)- The Mizan center for human rights has accused Tuesday the Israeli occupation authorities of blackmailing Palestinian patients at Beit Hanon (Erez) crossing point and pressuring them to turn spies in exchange for allowing them go for medical treatment outside the besieged Gaza Strip.

In a statement it issued in this regard, and a copy of which was obtained by the PIC, the human rights center revealed that the IOA stopped Palestinian citizen Ahmad Asfoor, 19, and his father at the crossing point as they were heading for Mar Yousef hospital in the occupied city of Jerusalem for treatment.

Both the son and the father were forced to take off their clothes before the Israeli soldiers put them under interrogation despite the deteriorating health of the son, and confiscated around three thousand dollars allocated for Ahmad’s medical treatment in the hospital in addition to the passports and the medical reports they were carrying, the center confirmed.

The young man was wounded in an Israeli missile attack on a group of civilians in the southern Gaza Strip town of Abasan last January. Three other Palestinian civilians were also injured in the shelling, sources in the center revealed.

According to the father, the IOF troops maltreated him and his son before telling him to return back to Gaza and that his son would remain in the custody of the Israeli intelligence for further interrogation.

“Ahmad needs special care as he is not able eat or go to toilet without help. There must be someone to stay beside him and help him to do that”, the bereaved father underlined.

International legal centers and human rights organizations had castigated the IOA for maltreating and extorting Palestinian patients seeking medical treatment outside the Gaza Strip after the IOA sealed off all crossing points and barely allowed few medicines into the Strip’s hospitals.

Palestinian sources confirmed that close to 400 Palestinian patients, mostly children, mothers, and elderly people had died as a result of the repressive Israeli siege on the Strip.