5 December 2024
MAP’s Interim CEO Steve Cutts, reflects on his recent visit to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)’s projects in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as a first-time visitor to the occupied Palestinian territory.
I was really looking forward to meeting our Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) team in Ramallah, but for a while it seemed that my visit might start and end at the Allenby Bridge in Jordan. Thankfully, after eventually getting through the somewhat chaotic process of exiting Jordan, and being questioned about the reason for my visit, I was finally granted an extremely short (three-day) visa by the Israeli authorities some three hours after we boarded our bus in Jordan to take us across the bridge. As was explained to me later, the shortening of visa periods is just one of many ways in which the activity and movement of humanitarian organisations – as well as of Palestinians – is being progressively more and more restricted with checkpoints, denial of access, new roads cutting off communities and the seizure of more land for settlers.
Over three days, I visited several MAP projects. These included a weekly mobile clinic we deploy, which is run by our partner the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS), in the Jordan Valley; a women-led centre just outside the Jenin refugee camp; and the Spafford Center, a simply wonderful organisation bringing “healing, hope and prosperity” to Palestinian children and their families in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem.
From these visits, I saw the profound difference MAP is making to the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. Our local team who accompanied me during these project visits were rightly proud of our work, and really helped me to understand the plight of the Palestinian people.
I quickly realised that while the world is gazing in horror at the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza, and the war it provoked in Lebanon, the massive escalation of Israeli military and settler attacks in the West Bank are going largely unnoticed by international media.
I saw myself the huge acceleration of settlement building across the West Bank in violation of international law. I learned how Israel is seizing more and more land from the Palestinian population and is planning to completely evict the community benefiting from the mobile clinic that I visited, to enable further settlement expansion. I heard how Israeli settlers are harassing Palestinians with impunity: I saw pictures and a video of a settler stopping Palestinian children going to school; I met a farmer impoverished because most of his sheep have been stolen by settlers; and I learnt of direct settler attacks on Palestinian men, women and children.
In the Jenin refugee camp, next to the women-run centre MAP supports, things were even worse. Just a week before my visit, there had been an Israeli military “incursion”, which is code for a mass terrorisation of the community – with bombing, drones and soldiers shooting Palestinians, the bulldozing of roads and widespread destruction of shops, businesses and residential properties.
Saddest of all, I was taken to a new cemetery, the final resting place for those killed over the past year. Among the scores of graves were many very small plots, reserved for the children so tragically and unforgivably killed. Shown the grave of one small eight-year-old boy, recently shot dead I was told while just riding his bicycle, I quietly wept.
My visit to a Palestinian hospital in Ramallah brought home the huge challenge faced by the public health service in responding to the massive challenges – and why MAP has such an important role to play. Israel’s withholding of clearance revenues to the Palestinian Authority means that doctors and health workers are not receiving their monthly salaries and are only being paid occasionally. Moreover, the desperately needed new emergency room being built to replace the outdated and massively overcrowded existing room cannot be finished or equipped for lack of funding.
It was encouraging to meet with UK Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office officials in Jerusalem as they were full of praise for MAP, our work and our advocacy. However, without a radical change of policy and thinking at the leadership level in the UK, I’m not sure this counts for much.
My final reflections from my first short visit were that the West Bank is a strangely beautiful place, and Jerusalem is an incomparable and wonderful city in so many ways – that should be accessible by all peoples, regardless of their nationality or religion. The Palestinian people I met in the West Bank were overwhelmingly warm, friendly and yet remarkably determined and steadfast.
But they also told me that they desperately want – and need – the world to learn about their suffering.
Please consider donating to support our emergency response in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon.
Photo: MAP's Interim CEO, Steve Cutts, with the PMRS mobile clinic team.
