Hassan, an 8-year-old Gazan boy, could consider himself lucky. Last year, thanks to his serious illness, Israel let him in to be treated in a Tel Aviv hospital. Israel boasts of its generosity: after four decades of occupation, which has left Gaza's hospitals on a Third World level, followed by years of siege, which has exhausted the little equipment and medicine arsenal those wretched hospitals had acquired, Israel grants treatment to a small number of mostly terminal Palestinian patients, provided the full cost is paid by the Palestinian National Authority. How very generous indeed.
Since every Arab is a terrorist until the opposite is proven, Israel lets at best just one adult, usually a woman, accompany a sick child into Israel. Hassan's mother could go with him. But no Palestinian vehicles are allowed in. Having crossed the checkpoint into Israel, how would the ill child and his mother make the 45 miles to Tel Aviv? Public transport is unfeasible; a taxi or an ambulance is unaffordable.
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