Mohammed has been living in Ramallah since 2022, but his registered address is Gaza. That was enough for an Israeli judge to ban him from receiving cancer treatment in Israel, thus rendering his death inevitable. He shares the fate of 18,500 patients in Gaza, barred from life-saving treatment
Court rulings constitute “the great library of the occupation,” human rights attorney Avigdor Feldman recently wrote. “Unlike other state authorities, judges are required to issue written, reasoned decisions. Thus, this vast library has come into being, its volumes accumulating side by side over the years.”
A recent ruling by the deputy president of the Jerusalem District Court, Judge Ram Winograd, adds yet another chapter to this ever-expanding collection.
Meet Mohammed. He is 5 years old and has spent most of his life battling cancer. He is in Ramallah, and his condition has worsened to the extent that hospitals in the West Bank cannot provide the treatment he needs.
Just half an hour away, doctors at Sheba Medical Center stand ready to give him life-saving care. The Palestinian Authority is covering the costs. Even under the occupation regime, some Palestinian children are considered “fortunate” enough to be granted permission by the occupying power to cross from the West Bank into Israel for life-saving treatment.
But Mohammed’s luck ran out. Although he has been living in Ramallah since 2022 to receive treatment, his registered address is the Gaza Strip. According to the judge in his case, the simple fact that his official address is in Gaza is enough to render his death inevitable.
This is the logic that links oppression in the West Bank with oppression in Gaza. Tens of thousands of Palestinians living in Gaza, wounded and sick, have no remedy in the Strip – either because most of the health system’s capabilities were destroyed in Israel’s attacks, or because of the long-standing reliance on Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for treatments that are unavailable locally, such as chemotherapy and dialysis.
Indeed, one subchapter in the lengthening annals of the “library of the occupation” has it in writing that according to Israel, preventing Gaza’s people from receiving treatment in hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is justified.
Here, then, is the full legal argument: For the purpose of evacuating Mohammed for life-saving treatment, his presence in the West Bank – which would at least give him the potential to gain favor in the occupier’s eyes and receive treatment in Israel in this case – is nullified, solely on the basis of his Gaza address, by the sweeping ban since the Hamas attack of October 2023 that prevents Gazans from traveling for medical care either in Israel or the West Bank.
The judge sent the child’s family on a Popperian exercise in the realm of “unfalsifiable” claims: to prove that the treatment located 50 kilometers, 31 miles, away was “the only one within reach, both professionally and geographically.” These efforts failed to meet the judge’s standard.
He then required the family to account for the limits to the mandate of the World Health Organization – the body that coordinates with Israel the few medical evacuations permitted from Gaza – which does not extend to arranging evacuations for Gazans like Mohammed, who are located outside Gaza and now require further transfer.
The court is betraying an obliviousness to the irony of posing that question while affirming the policy creating the massive waiting list in the first place, begging the reply: “Why call out a speck in someone else’s eye when you’ve got a log in your own?”
Despite the assessment of Mohammed’s doctors that a journey to Amman, taking hours at best, would worsen his already fragile condition, the judge ruled that it had not been demonstrated that the trip would cause substantial harm to the boy’s health.
Nor was a racially discriminatory argument absent. The court criticizes the request to instruct that Mohammed be allowed treatment in a location “not designated for Palestinian patients coming from all parts of Judea and Samaria” – in other words, at an Israeli hospital.
Most shocking is where the court ventures beyond the ratio decidendi and what was necessary for the decision. “Even if the petitioner were to carry the burden of proving the impossibility of obtaining medical treatment anywhere outside Israel, this would afford him no relief.”
In the court’s reasoning, since at least some of the intelligence that enabled Hamas’ massacre on October 7 was obtained following the presence of “uninvolved parties” in Israel, “there is no need to discuss whether the petitioners’ family is ‘directly uninvolved in terrorism.'” Instead, “it suffices that the petitioners have relatives in Gaza who could be pressured by terrorist elements into cooperation.” The court’s truth is laid bare: There are no “uninvolved individuals” in Gaza.
And yet, space for judgment remains. The Supreme Court, serving as the High Court of Justice, could rule differently in a landmark petition currently before it concerning 18,500 patients in Gaza needing urgent care, who are barred from accessing life-saving treatment in hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Yet the petition is proceeding at a painfully slow pace. Since October 2023, the High Court has either dismissed or postponed nearly every petition concerning violations amounting to war crimes. In the rare instance when a case was heard on its merits, it was reduced to a technical-bureaucratic discussion. Such was the case with a 2024 petition for a mechanism to evacuate Gazan patients for urgent care.
The fate of the current petition seems no different. Filed last November, its first hearing has been scheduled only for July, while by now more than 1,200 Gazans on the WHO’s list of patients needing evacuation have died, and many more will die, while waiting for the dwindling evacuations to third countries that can be counted on one hand.
Between impulse and action lies judgment. Some have chosen to act differently. Among them are Palestinian medical professionals who, with courage and resolve, continue to carry out their calling under impossible conditions, and Israeli doctors who amplify the voices of their Palestinian colleagues and insist on the best possible care for every patient whose fate they can influence.
More than 30 senior Israeli physicians have now asked to join the petition to restore the medical corridor between Gaza and the West Bank. The annals of the occupation will record the work of all these individuals, as well as whatever the court ultimately decides.
Tirza Leibowitz is the deputy director and director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights Israel.