As dawn breaks at the Rehan crossing between the occupied northern West Bank and Israel, a long line of Palestinian laborers emerges from a dim neon corridor.
Emerging from the line of medical permit holders, Mamoune Abou al-Roub strides towards the car of Yaël Noy, her 6-year-old son, Adam, dozing in his arms. Direction: a hospital near Tel-Aviv where the boy is followed after being treated for eye cancer.
Yaël Noy is one of the Israeli volunteers from the Road to Recovery association who lead dozens of Palestinians, mostly children, every day from crossing points in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals so that they can benefit from treatments not available in the Palestinian Territories.
These treatments are paid for by the Palestinian authorities, which is not the case for transport to and from hospitals. However, its cost is prohibitive for many families.
The association was born out of requests for help from Palestinians who were part of a collective of Palestinian and Israeli families bereaved by the conflict.
According to him, today it has a thousand active members, helping nearly 3,000 patients every year.
“She is wonderful Yael (…) She is always happy, it fills my heart,” said Abu al-Roub, 40, in a sketchy Hebrew learned on the construction sites he works on in Israel.
In the back of the car, young Adam fell asleep, snuggled up against his father. In the rearview mirror, the driver smiles at her passenger and exchanges a few words with him.
“Usually it’s Adam’s mother, Sabah, who accompanies him. She doesn’t speak Hebrew, and I don’t speak Arabic. So we speak the language of the heart,” he says. -She.
“These trips are an opportunity for all the volunteers to meet Palestinians,” adds Ms. Noy, who recently became director of Road to Recovery.
“We don’t know them, we never meet them. There is a whole people living next to us, they are our neighbours.”
In 2022, more than 110,000 permits for passage to Israel for medical treatment were issued to Palestinians from the West Bank, which has nearly three million Palestinians, and more than 17,000 permits to residents of Gaza, a territory of more than two million people. residents controlled by the Islamist movement Hamas and subject to an Israeli blockade, according to Cogat, the body of the Israeli Ministry of Defense overseeing civilian activities in the Palestinian Territories.
However, many Palestinian patients are unable to obtain treatment in Israel, following the refusal of the Israeli authorities to issue them a permit to pass, or the refusal of the Palestinian authorities to pay for treatment that is often expensive.
The car drives along the highway along the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank. “I wouldn’t be able to live here if I didn’t do something in this harsh and complicated reality created by the occupation,” says Ms. Noy.
“It’s the minimum to remain a respectable human being.”
But not all the volunteers are opposed to the occupation, she underlines, specifying that there are among them “settlers, religious and right-wing people.”
Like Noam Ben Zvi, 72, a retired Israeli army officer, for whom, “even if we leave the West Bank, the war with the Arabs will continue.”
This does not prevent him, for several years, from regularly transporting a teenager from Jenin (north of the West Bank) to the hospital in Jerusalem where she is treated, from waiting for her for several hours to bring her back to the crossing point , about 150 kilometers away.
“Marie and her father, I love them. I don’t want them to wait hours at the hospital for another volunteer to drive them back,” he explains.
The transport of patients is coordinated on the Palestinian side by Naëm Abou Youssef who also serves as a translator for the Israeli volunteers.
“When I learned what (the association) was doing, I couldn’t believe that Jews could do stuff like that,” said the 50-year-old who lives in a village near Qalqiliya, in the northern West Bank. , in an area where clashes with Israeli soldiers are frequent.
Two of his sons were arrested by the Israeli army and held for several months without charges, he said.
“People here often know of Israel only the raids of soldiers at night on houses, occupation, fear, hatred and revenge.”
At 7 a.m., Ms. Noy ??dropped off her two passengers in front of the children’s pavilion at the Sheba Medical Center. M. Abou al-Roub turns around and gives him a final wave.
“The end of the conflict can only come from a political agreement,” believes Yuval Roth, the association’s founder, “but in this reality, each trip of this kind is a small one-hour peace.”
06/27/2023 05:31:55 – Rehan (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP