When Palestinian Jihad Leaders Need Medical Treatment, They Go to Israeli Hospitals

In 2014, the wife of PA President Mahmoud Abbas was successfully treated in Israel for an unknown condition. In 2018, an Israeli specialist was sent to Ramallah to treat Abbas himself, resulting in a dramatic improvement in his health and apparently saving his life. Abbas and his wife are not the only members of his family who have been treated by Israel. Mahmoud Abbas’ younger brother, Abu Louai, was treated in Assuta Hospital, a private hospital in Tel Aviv. Abu Louai is 78 years old and suffers from cancer. He lives in Qatar. The PA press has not, and will not, ever publish this information, nor will the rest of the Arab press should they ever learn about it. Notice that Abu Louai chose or rather, his brother chose for him, to be treated in an Israeli private hospital, even though the alternative was not, in his case, a poorly-funded Palestinian hospital, but rather, a state-of-the-art hospital in enormously rich Qatar. No doubt Mahmoud Abbas wanted the best care for his brother, and his own experience with an Israeli specialist who treated him in Ramallah for a life-threatening condition led him to insist that his brother be treated by Israeli medical personnel as well.

It is the same with the top echelon of leaders of Hamas – they want to be treated by Israeli doctors in Israeli hospitals. In October 2014, just two months after Hamas started a war with Israel in which it launched more than 10,000 missiles at civilian targets, Sarah Haniyeh, the daughter of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, was treated at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital following complications she suffered in a Gaza hospital. Around the same time, but unreported, Hamas leader Haniyeh’s mother-in-law and granddaughter also left Gaza for treatment in Israeli hospitals. Like Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas, wanted only the best medical treatment for his relatives — his daughter, his mother-in-law, and his granddaughter. Naturally he arranged for all of them to be treated by Israeli doctors at Israeli hospitals.

Another absurdity that separates Israeli medicine from Palestinian cynicism and hypocrisy is the example of terrorist Yahya al-Sinwar, head of the Hamas political bureau in the Gaza Strip, who, while imprisoned in Israel in 2007, was operated on to have a brain tumor removed. Now, having been released in 2011 in the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange deal, he continues to furiously beat the Hamas drum for acquiring, and firing, more and more missiles, at the evil Zionists. Like Mahmoud Abbas and his relatives, like Ismail Haniyeh and his relatives, Yahya Sinwar was a beneficiary of Israeli medicine. And like them, after having his life saved by Israeli doctors, Sinwar went immediately back to denouncing Israeli Jews as “murderers” and calling for the destruction of their state. These Palestinian recipients of Israeli medical care are unembarrassed; they do not think of themselves as hypocrites; as they see things, a Muslim can accept aid from Infidels and still want those Infidels dead.

Hamas has even tried using suicide bombers to blow up Israeli doctors while they were in the very act of treating Palestinian patients. in 2005 Hamas sent a Gaza woman named Samir Ibrahim Bas to Soroka Hospital in Beersheba for life-saving treatments. But Hamas secretly padded her underclothing with 20 pounds of high-powered explosives so she could blow up both herself, and the doctors treating her in the Israeli hospital. Fortunately, those explosives were discovered in time.

Beyond the medical treatments given to the very terrorists who have sworn to destroy the Jewish state, Israel opened up a field hospital on its Syrian border, in the Golan Heights, to treat those who fled Syria, so as to seek medical help during that country’s civil war. The Israeli doctors and nurses asked no questions of any of the hundreds of wounded they treated. The patients included soldiers from the hostile Syrian Army — still technically at war with Israel. And those patients all received the same superior care that Israeli doctors provide to their fellow Jews.

How many anxious Palestinian parents will in the future be relieved when they learn that Israeli doctors will treat their child? Unlike the Hamas and PA leaders, ordinary Palestinians whose children have benefited from medical treatment by Israelis are openly, and permanently, grateful. The mother of Amir, a five-year-old boy whose life was saved by Israeli heart surgeons, said something that those reporting on Israel and the Palestinians should learn by heart: “When the doctors told us there was a possibility for Israeli doctors to carry out the complicated operation Amir needed, we were so happy. Everyone here in Gaza talks about how Israeli doctors are the most professional in the world and that they can be trusted completely.”

The mother of Amir has said what those other recipients of Israeli medical care – the ungrateful big shots of Hamas and PA – should say but don’t, and instead choose to forget. But you and I and the world’s major media don’t need to forget. We need to remember.