PARIS, March 2: Two leading officials of French NGO Medecins du Monde (Doctors without Borders) have launched an SOS with regard to the sanitary situation of Palestine, saying that the health conditions in Gaza and the West Bank have become “absolutely dramatic.”

Dr Marcel-Francis Kahn, a professor of medicine, and Philippe Luxereau, a heart specialist, who recently returned from Palestine, claimed during a press briefing in Paris that too many Palestinians had become the “health hostages of Sharon,” this largely the result of Israeli forces “restraining their access” to medical services.

The two doctors, who were joined by Leila Shahid, the Palestinian representative to France, denounced what they characterised as the “flagrant violations” by the Israeli army of the Geneva Conventions, notably those articles that concern the rights, during wartime, of civilian populations.

Doctors Kahn and Luxereau said the sanitary conditions were particularly bad at two camps located at Balata and Jenine, neither of which could offer hospitalization to their wounded. Moreover, they noted, victims of the war could not be evacuated for treatment elsewhere because of Israeli encirclement of the camps. Mrs Shahid noted that Dr Moussa Abou Hameid, director of hospitals for the Palestinian health ministry, whom she’d just telephoned, confirmed that the situation had become “catastrophic.”

Dr Luxereau reported, for his part, that according to information he’d received from the Red Crescent, some 30 Palestinian civilians had already died because they had no access to medical treatment as a result of the Israeli army’s encirclement of Balata and Jenine refugee camps.

Moreover, he noted, he’d also learned that more than two-thirds of all ambulances available in Palestine had been damaged since the start of the second Intifada with most of them rendered inoperable.

The two doctors also revealed that other segments of the population had also become the victims of the precarious sanitary situation in Palestine, as they no longer had access to appropriate medical treatment. Pregnant women on the way to hospital often were obliged to give birth at Israeli army checkpoints, small children had died because they were deprived of timely medical assistance, as were older patients being treated for heart problems or undergoing dialysis, because the Israeli Army had denied them access to appropriate medical facilities.

Also contributing to the catastrophic situation of health care in Palestine, said the two doctors, was the decision by Israel to levy exorbitant customs duties on medical equipment being taken into Palestine by foreign medical teams. Often, too, they said, once the fees were paid, the arrival of the teams and their equipment at medical facilities was unnecessarily delayed by Israeli authorities.

As for the general population, they warned, its situation too had worsened in recent weeks, serious nutritional problems had appeared in certain localities, and the “psychological development” of Palestinian children had also been severely affected by the constant bombardment and their effective inability to go to school.

Agencies add: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived in Washington on Saturday to persuade the United States to play a more active role in Middle East peacemaking based on a new Saudi peace initiative.

Mubarak, whose country made peace with Israel in 1979 and is one of Washington’s closest allies in the Arab world, will tell President George W. Bush on Tuesday that the United States cannot step away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The peace process is going through the blackest period in decades. America cannot be detached,” Egyptian government spokesman Nabil Osman told reporters in Washington on Friday.

Egypt has welcomed a Saudi proposal for normal relations between Israel and Arab states, provided Israel withdraws to the borders as they stood before the Middle East conflict of 1967.

Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made the proposal last month.