CAMERA/Snapshots
09 December 09
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemned “external travel restrictions imposed on the population” by the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers. It said Palestinian police on December 7 “prevented 37 patients and their companions from heading towards the [Erez] crossing to travel to hospitals” in the West Bank and Israel.
PCHR called on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip government to cancel Interior Ministry provisions announced on November 25. Lengthy forms, multiple identification, photocopies of Israeli permits and a requirement that individuals obtain permission to travel abroad three days in advance “have obstructed their travel to hospital, raising concerns regarding their health,” the organization charged.
The Washington Post did not cover the story. In a letter to Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli, retired McClatchy Newspapers Washington bureau chief and CAMERA member Leo Rennert noted that the newspaper “has devoted extensive space to Palestinians discomforted by Israeli travel restrictions .... while ignoring or paying at best minimal attention to Palestinian abuses of Palestinian human rights.”
It should be noted that PCHR, funded by the European Union, Norway, Denmark, the Ford Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Fund, among others, routinely refers to Jerusalem a part of the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces as the Israel Occupation Forces, and falsely claims that “a very limited number of [Palestinian Arab] patients” have been permitted to cross at Erez for treatment in Israel when thousand do annually. That would seem to make its criticism of Hamas’ regulations as “illegal measures violat[ing] international human rights standards” and medical threats especially newsworthy.
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