THE LIFE-SAVING TREATMENTS UNDER THREAT FROM TRUMP’S CUT IN FUNDING
▶ Ben Lynfield reports from East Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria hospital
Afirst glance inside the Augusta Victoria hospital, on the southern side of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, seems to reveal health care as usual.
Patients and doctors scurry around while families tend to their relatives.
In such places, worry beads are a common sight among Arab men. They are less usual for a 12-year-old to be holding.
Such is the small comfort for Mohammed Darbah, from Rafah in the Gaza Strip, as he begins another chemotherapy session for leukaemia. His mother Wafa stands by his side in the paediatric ward.
“He’s getting better since he started to come here,” she told The National.
But Mohammed’s treatment is taking place under the shadow of US funding cuts. This hospital is likely to be hit by President Donald Trump’s decision to cut $25 million (Dh91.81m) of funding set aside for it and five others in East Jerusalem.
Despite efforts to keep the children’s spirits up, parents, practitioners and nursing staff are deeply worried about how children’s care could be affected.
The move hits the most vulnerable group possible: those grappling with life-threatening disease.
Mohammed is one of many. Sitting at a nearby table are two other 12-year-olds, hooked up to intravenous chemotherapy while they paint images of Spiderman. Down the hall, two red-nosed clowns speak cheerfully to the young patients, singing and drawing smiles from very small children receiving dialysis treatment.
The politics of the health cuts is causing dismay.
“This American decision arouses fear,” Wafa Darbah said. “It’s very dangerous. Let Mohammed finish his treatment so that he can continue his life normally, freely, go back to his school and play with his friends.”
Her son is one of 800 inpatients and outpatients treated daily at the hospital, which provides advanced care beyond the more rudimentary facilities available in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Basma Khoury, 58, a former United Nations Development Programme project manager, from Ramallah, who is being treated for breast cancer that spread to her spinal cord, was jolted by the American government’s action.
“I’m afraid I’ll be affected. It’s very unfair from a human view. The US is trying to press the Palestinian Authority but the cancer patients are not responsible for politics,” she said.
Ms Khoury’s resilience is clear – she wore a shirt with the motto “Good Vibes Only” printed on it – but she has had cancer since 1997.
Her chemotherapy treatment has changed several times and involves a great deal of morphine.
“This kind of chemo causes a lot of bone pain, joint pain and fatigue. I am always having cramps in my intestines. One treatment causes a week of suffering.”
She stopped work three years ago.
“I reached the point where I couldn’t stand. I was in extreme pain. Taking pain medication made me drowsy and so I wasn’t all there. It wasn’t fair to my employer to stay in my job.”
But with the absence of a welfare safety net in the Palestinian Authority areas, Ms Khoury has had to rely on relatives.
With her treatment unavailable elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, Augusta Victoria is her only viable care venue. She cannot afford an Israeli hospital and travelling to Jordan is difficult and expensive.
“Of course it’s life-saving treatment here and it’s not just the treatment that is life saving, it’s the psychological support you get. We have social workers, and a psychotherapist comes to see me every time I have a treatment. Today she told me ‘you can call me at 2am and I will answer you’.”
The health of such Palestinians is not worth maintaining in the US view. A US State Department official told Reuters that the money withheld from the hospitals would be redirected to “high priority projects elsewhere”. The Trump White House ordered a review of US funding to Palestinians after President Mahmoud Abbas decided to boycott US officials after the American decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. That choice upended decades of US policy and was followed by the relocation of the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.
In recent weeks, the US withdrew $200m in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and cut all US funding for the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. But Palestinian leaders say they will not cave in and return to peace talks under US auspices, citing what they say is blatant bias from the Trump government towards Israel.
How much more dire the hospital situation will become – and how quickly that will happen – is not clear.
The Palestinian Authority has pledged to make up the $25m shortfall.
“Hopefully the short term will be managed by additional funding from the national budget,” said Walid Nammour, chief executive of Augusta Victoria and secretary of the East Jerusalem Hospitals Network.
“At this stage the question mark is more over the long term.”
A quarter of the hospital’s budget was in the past supplied by the United States Agency for International Development, he said.
The picture is bleak, according to Physicians for Human
Rights-Israel, an Israeli organisation that assists Palestinians with health care, given that the Palestinian Authority owes the hospitals a lot of money.
“Hospitals in East Jerusalem have been in financial distress for some time and closing the tap could lead to their complete collapse – withholding the right to health from tens of thousands of patients,” the group said.
A physician treating Mohammed Darbah, who asked not to be identified, said of the youngster: “He’s improving but he still needs a lot of heavy chemotherapy, which is very tiring and very risky. In the coming round he will need blood and platelets. He’s finished the easy part and the hard part is on its way.”
The same doctor said of the US funding cuts. “I’m worried that at some point it will affect the quality of treatment. At some point, we will face difficulties with our diagnostic and treatment options.
“This is like blackmail. It is outrageous that you blackmail kids through their treatment.”