NABLUS (West Bank): With medicine running low at the government-run Rafidia Hospital, a growing number of Palestinians make their way to a nearby mosque, one of the few places left in Nablus willing and able to fill prescriptions.
While a US-led economic blockade against the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority is crippling government hospitals, clinics and schools, many funded by Islamic charities linked to the Islamic group are serving more people than ever.
The Islamic Solidarity Clinic at the Rawdah mosque, which is funded by a Hamas-supported Zakat charity in Nablus in the occupied West Bank, still receives medicines from local factories. Patient numbers have grown 40 per cent.
The clinic is also paying staff, albeit only half their normal monthly wages of 450 Jordanian dinars ($635) for doctors and 250 Jordanian dinars ($353) for nurses.
Up the road at Rafidia in a city often a flashpoint for violence, doctors and nurses haven’t seen a pay check since Hamas came to power in March and are nearly out of anaesthetics.
“Without anaesthesia, everything will be stopped,” said Husam Jawhari, director of Rafidia. “It will be fatal.”
Hafez Sadder, Director of the Solidarity Clinic, said “America is the loser” because the crisis is making Palestinians more dependent on Hamas, not less, as Washington hoped.
“They (the Palestinian people) believe in Hamas. Anyone who gives them medicine, they are the best, they are better than anybody else,” Sadder said.
Western countries have demanded Hamas recognise Israel, “renounce violence” and accept interim peace deals with the Jewish state if it wants full aid to the government restored.
Hamas owes much of its popularity to services provided by Islamic health centres and schools. Western diplomats and Palestinian officials say Hamas and other groups fund these services by fundraising at mosques and smuggling.
In addition to teachers and health clinic staff, at least some Hamas-linked security personnel appear to be getting paid, said Palestinian officials not linked to Hamas.
“The money is only going to Hamas supporters,” a Palestinian security source based in the West Bank said. “It doesn’t go through the banks.”
A Hamas spokesman was caught on Friday trying to enter Gaza with 639,000 euros ($804,000) stuffed in his clothes. He said the cash was earmarked for needy Palestinians.
“Hamas is doing pretty well for itself,” said a Western diplomat who tracks the group’s finances. While government institutions are collapsing, the diplomat said, “there’s money in their system”.
Hamas lawmaker Yasser Mansour dismissed suggestions that Islamists were shoring up their own network at the expense of those who did not support them.
“The network of schools and clinics is still working and functioning and providing services to needy people, not just Hamas members,” Mansour said through a translator in Nablus.
Under European pressure, Israel on Sunday authorised the release of $11 million in frozen Palestinian taxes to buy medical supplies and transfer them to Palestinian hospitals.
The European Union is also in the process of crafting a new aid mechanism that could provide energy and welfare payments to doctors, nurses and teachers.
Like health clinics, private Islamic schools with ties to Hamas are paying their teachers, although administrators say a growing number of parents can no longer afford the tuition.
“We’re having some little problems but we haven’t stopped paying them,” said Tarq Jabri, director of the Muslim Youth Society school in the West Bank city of Hebron.
“Our system is continuing.”
To meet the heavy patient demand in Nablus, Sadder’s cheery clinic, which boasts its own orthopaedics unit, is now staying open an extra three hours a day.
He estimates that he fills at least seven prescriptions a day from patients who can no longer get the drugs they need at run-down Rafidia, whose back entrance on a recent morning was partially obstructed by a metal board still dripping with blood from two militants killed by Israeli soldiers.
Jawhari said some of his destitute workers can no longer afford a 5 shekel ($1.1) taxi ride to work or formula for their newborns. “I hate politicians. Health care should be kept out of politics,” he said.
Sadder said his clinic, while better off than Rafidia, was starting to run low on certain imported medications used to treat asthma, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Many of Sadder’s new patients cannot afford to pay the 2 shekel — $0.45 — fee to see a doctor, and he is increasingly filling prescriptions for free. He said less money was coming in from Zakat because donations had dropped off.
Clinic administrators say many Palestinians can no longer afford to make donations, while US pressure on banks has made it more difficult to bring in money from wealthy donors abroad.
Fawwaz Hammad, financial manager of the al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, tells a similar story: the Zakat-funded hospital was seeing 25 per cent more patients at its outpatient clinic and 40 per cent more for inpatient care.
“Our clinic is working. Our radiology department is working. Our laboratory is working. But the government (hospital) is not working at all,” said Hammad.
At al-Razi, doctors, nurses and other workers were paid their full salaries in March and April. They started getting half their pay checks this month, but Hammad said his staff knows “our problem is less than the problem of others”.
Hammad said his pharmacy’s inventory was declining, but added: “We can manage that. For sure, it is better here than in the (government-run) hospital.”
Sadder from Nablus agreed: “They have no medicine there... We are better off than them.”—Reuters
