31-May-07: Two children

One of last week's Qassam attacks on southern Israel quietly exacted a delayed and very expensive price several days ago. The report reached Israel's media this morning and as of this writing it's not reported in a single news channel outside the borders of this country.

In the town of Sderot, a bus transporting four special-needs children suffered a near-direct-hit from one of dozens of rockets fired into Israel by Pal-Arab terrorists. Shrapnel from the resulting explosion penetrated the vehicle and wounded all the children. One child, thirteen year-old wheelchair-bound Chai Shalom, who had cerebral palsy, was deaf and mute, and had congenital heart problems, suffered injuries from the bombing serious enough to require hospitalization.

Sadly, little Chai Shalom (Chai means "life" in Hebrew, and shalom is the Hebrew word for "peace") died of his injuries in Beer Sheva's Soroka Hospital.

And since balance is all the rage in the foreign media, here's another report from a different vantage point.

Tom Gross reports that a child with congenital heart complications - this one a newborn Gazan baby - was rushed to Israel on Sunday while Qassams whizzed overhead. An Israeli ambulance took the eight-day-old Pal-Arab infant from Gaza to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv's suburbs. As Tom writes:

"Unreported by the international media, Israeli ambulances transfer patients from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals on an almost daily basis. According to Dr Dudi Mishali, head of the Department of Pediatric and Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the hospital next to Tel Aviv, an average of three Palestinian babies with heart defects come to his department alone every week."

Mishali said

"We have daily communications by phone and fax with doctors in Gaza. There is no heart surgeon in the Strip, so they transfer all of these children, and there are many, to be operated on here." 

The expenses are largely paid for by the hospital.

Dozens of British doctors are calling for the Israeli Medical Association to be expelled from the World Medical Association.