Israeli doctors battle to save Saeeb Erekat's life
If only hateful hypocrisy were a curable disease
Saeeb Erekat, Ha’aretz conference, 2015
The 65 year-old Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeeb Erekat, is deteriorating so badly from Covid-19 that he has been rushed from his home in the “West Bank” to a hospital in Israel. It is Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem.
That fact is presumably deeply unpalatable to Erekat’s comrades in the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In a statement on Sunday, the PLO said:
Following his contraction of Covid-19, and due to the chronic health problems he faces in the respiratory system, Dr Erekat's condition now requires medical attention in a hospital. He is currently being transferred to a hospital in Tel Aviv.
The Times of Israel reported that the PLO couldn’t even bring itself to say he was being admitted to hospital in Israel, but said he was
being transferred to a hospital in the 1948 areas.
The BBC reported for most of today that Erekat
has been admitted to hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel with Covid-19.
In fact, as the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel and jns.org correctly reported, he had been admitted to Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, Israel. The BBC finally updated its website report this evening to identify the Israeli hospital as Hadassah.
There he will receive the finest care by Israeli doctors in the attempt to save his life. Those doctors will be both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. He will be nursed by a staff consisting of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. He will be treated alongside patients who are both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, and he will be dealt with, as they all are, according to the priority dictated by his clinical needs.
There’s one further point. On Palestinian Media Watch, Itamar Marcus writes:
Palestinian Media Watch has reported that while Israel has been giving significant medical training and other aid to the Palestinian population to fight the coronavirus, the PA has been using the pandemic outbreak to spread the libel that Israel is intentionally infecting Palestinians with the virus and trying to kill them.
Erekat, a Fatah Central Committee member and PLO chief negotiator, went even further when he joined this chorus of hate, penning an op-ed in which he libelled Israelis, claiming they are ”spitting on Palestinian cars and property in order to transfer the Corona disease” to fulfil ”the wild desire to get rid of the Palestinian people in any way.” [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 30, 2020]
If Erekat really believed his own libel that Israelis ”have the wild desire to get rid of the Palestinian people,” he certainly would not have chosen Hadassah hospital to treat him and try to save his life.
This contradiction documents once again that the PA leadership is consciously lying when it demonises Israel to its population with sole purpose of creating hatred toward Israelis and Jews.
It will be interesting to see how many British or other western media outlets do full justice to this.
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