It was a routine examination, a lanky doctor checking a frightened boy's chest with a stethoscope, then showing him how to use an inhaler for the wheezing he suffers when playing too hard.
But the doctor was Israeli, the boy Palestinian and the exam took place in a dusty West Bank hill town in a schoolhouse converted for the day into a makeshift clinic.
A group of 650 Israeli doctors has been sending a contingent once a week to various places in the West Bank and Gaza to offer health care. The doctors say they want to show a gentler face of Israeli society after the violence of the last three years.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Khalid Moussa, a villager who visited the clinic to have his son's eyes checked, said the doctors' visits were a needed overture that he hoped would teach Israelis about Palestinian culture.
"If you antagonize me, I fight back," he said. "If you respect me and honor my existence, I'm willing to give you my last piece of bread to show you the same attitude."
The visits are also an example of the efforts by people on both sides of the conflict to keep up a conversation even as civilians and fighters on both sides are killed. Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost children in the conflict meet to share their grief and press for peace, and there are organized dialogues for teenagers.
Recently, residents of Mevasseret Zion, a Jerusalem suburb, and Beit Sourik, an adjacent Palestinian village, flew kites as a demonstration of the neighborly relations they say will be damaged by the barrier that Israel is building between them.
The doctors are members of Physicians for Human Rights, an organization started in 1983 that dissents from many Israeli policies and says Israel could do more to achieve a peace accord.
Although they regard the Palestinian doctors with respect, the
Israeli doctors also know that there are too few specialists in the West Bank and that the poor often find it hard to get to doctors and hospitals because of the Israeli checkpoints set up to curb militants' attacks.
The group offers its services free, and even some of the doctors taking part concede that their work here is more a gesture than anything else.
Dr. Dani Schurr, a 55-year-old pediatrician who normally works in a Jerusalem clinic, said he came out several times a year.
"I want to be able to say that in this time I didn't just read the newspapers, but I went through the barricades and I worked with the people," he said. "It's a way to show another face of an Israeli."
On a recent day, eight doctors and four paramedics left Jerusalem in four vans and traveled 45 minutes into West Bank territory near Hebron before they veered onto a dirt road up to this farming village of stone and mud hovels.
Two hundred villagers awaited them in a rough-and-tumble line along a schoolhouse terrace, mostly women in long dresses and head scarves carrying small children.
Schurr examined more than 30 children. There was a three-year-old with a cleft palate, a toddler with a parasite brought on by eating unwashed vegetables and a 10-month-old girl with fever and diarrhea.
Dr. Abdel Rahim Johshan, a Palestinian, joined him for a consultation on eight-year old Hamad Ranim Aburam, a pale and slender, wheezing boy. Schurr offered a diagnosis of exercise-induced asthma and had a medical assistant bring in an inhaler.
"Lots of kids, as they grow up, the symptoms disappear," he assured Hamad's mother.
A local Palestinian Authority official, who helped arrange the visit but did not want to be identified, "The main reason we do this is the message of cooperation, the message that we can live with each other."
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
RSS