Exploited by the enemy
Two Gazan women were caught on Wednesday smuggling explosives from Gaza into Israel for Hamas. The sisters hid the weapons in medical supplies they had been given in Israel, after one had been treated here for cancer.
Last month, Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan revealed that Hamas was using Gazan cancer victims as mules to smuggle money and gold into Israel to finance terrorist operations.
Everyone remembers Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, the 21-year-old Palestinian woman from Gaza who in 2005 was caught wearing 10 kilo of explosives in her underwear, en route to blowup Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba where she was being treated for burns.
She admitted to being recruited by Fatah’s Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and added that she had wanted to kill as many Israeli children in the hospital as possible.
Despite the security risk, Israel annually allows tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave the Gaza Strip for medical treatment in Israel (and in the West Bank and Jordan).
I know this firsthand. For a decade I served as a public affairs and development officer at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, the largest hospital in the Middle East. At any given time, one-quarter of all patients in that institution’s Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital are Arabs from Gaza.
