Published: 13 January 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Doctors campaign against discrimination on religious grounds.
A clinic in southern Israel refused to provide first aid to a Palestinian hurt while working in the town, forcing him to leave the clinic still bleeding.
Hamoudi Abu Tarboosh, 23, was ultimately forced to go to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, which did treat him. The clinic in Kiryat Malachi which denied him treatment belongs to Clalit, one of Israel's main health maintenance organisations. Tarboosh is a resident of the West Bank town of Idna, located in the South Hebron Hills. While working at a produce store in Kiryat Malakhi on Sunday, his hand was sliced open when the shop’s glass door shattered. The shop is just a few dozen meters from the clinic.
He first went to the clinic with a colleague but was not even looked at. Then Dana Ayash, a Kiryat Malakhi resident who shops at the store, drove by and saw him outside, “holding his hand between his legs, doubled over in pain, with a puddle of blood on the floor,” she said.
She called the clinic to tell them she was bringing a patient with a slashed hand, and the clinic advised her to take him straight to the emergency room.
But when they arrived the manager asked to see the patient’s identity card. “She said she wouldn’t authorise [treatment] before seeing his ID card,” Ayash recounted. “I said I didn’t have anything at the moment, and she said it’s not at all clear to her that he’s authorised to be in Israel. I explained that he has all the necessary permits, his employer is on the way, and she should let him in.”
The case comes as the central doctors’ union in Israel has initiated a national advertising campaign to oppose what it views as a government minister’s assault on medical ethics.
Responding to controversial comments last month by far-right National Missions Minister Orit Strock, the Israel Medical Association (IMA) has placed ads on TV and radio stressing that doctors will never discriminate in the care they provide.
