20-Oct-14: Sincere wishes for a complete and thorough recovery as soon as possible [UPDATED]

Haniyeh: The power to ensure he is always
just a phone call away from arranging whatever
needs to be arranged [Image Source]

Generally, if you have some authoritative information about another person's medical condition or treatment, you keep it to yourself. Everyone is entitled to privacy when it comes to such things. But this note is about an exception.

Not for the first time, it's been revealed via media reports in the past day that the immediate family of one of the inner-circle Hamas families who have the Gaza Strip in their iron-fisted grip benefited from access to world-class Israeli medical care.

The details:

An Israeli hospital confirmed Sunday that it had treated the daughter of Hamas’s top leader in the Gaza Strip, weeks after a brutal war between Israel and the Islamist terror group. Avi Shushan, a spokesman for Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, said the daughter of Ismail Haniyeh was hospitalized for “a number of days” this month. He did not disclose what she was treated for. A spokeswoman for the Israeli military also confirmed the hospital stay. Hamas officials were not immediately available for comment... Haniyeh’s daughter was treated in Israel following complications during a standard medical procedure in Gaza, Reuters reported Sunday. [Times of Israel, October 19, 2014]

[UPDATE November 3, 2014: Add Moussa Abu Marzouk of Hamas to the class of 'leaders' discussed below - details here]

Haniyeh was, maybe still is, prime minister of a major part of the Palestinian political entity (see Wikipedia). It's complicated because in their world, reality is what the powerful demand it to be, and does not always fit well with the facts.

Happy, satisfied men [Image Source]

This hospitalization is not an isolated incident:

...Both Haniyeh’s mother-in-law and baby granddaughter were treated in Israel in the last year alone. On June 3, Maj. Guy Inbar, an Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman, said the terror group leader’s mother-in-law, 68, was allowed to enter from the Gaza Strip to receive cancer treatment at a Jerusalem hospital. [Times of Israel, October 19, 2014]

And

Last November, Haniyeh’s one-year-old granddaughter was evacuated to an Israeli hospital in critical condition, but was returned to her family in Gaza after her condition was deemed incurable, an Israeli military spokesman said. The girl later died of her condition. [Times of Israel, October 19, 2014]

And

In early 2012, Haniyeh allowed his sister, Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh, to accompany her critically ill husband to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel, for emergency heart treatment. After successful treatment and care, the couple returned to Gaza without incident. Word of the unusual visit was released only four months later. It remains to be seen how this special treatment for the leader's relatives will be regarded by Gazans. [Wikipedia, and an earlier post of ours "29-Oct-12: File away for use when Haniyeh is next depicted as partner for peace"]

First, we wish the daughter a speedy recovery. Ditto for the mother-in-law and the grandmother and the other members of the clan. Going to an Israeli hospital means getting access to highly professional and caring treatment, by far the best within a radius of thousands of kilometers for reasons the Palestinian Arab insiders know better than almost anyone else (hint: it's connected with decades of willfully walking away from tough political decisions about whether to invest the torrent of foreign aid money at their disposal in medical care and education, or in weapons and ammunition.)

Mashaal, Haniyeh: In the Arab world, few understand
better how poorly the Gazans are served by
their Islamists overlords than these two [Image Source] 

For the rest of us, not so involved in worrying about the health and welfare of the Haniyeh family but very concerned about the well-being of our own family, friends and neighbours, there are some strikingly clear dimensions to this that we wish were better understood by outsiders and commentators. (And let's note in passing how very little news coverage this spate of hospitalizations has gotten in the mainstream news media).

We referred to them here last year ["18-Nov-13: When Hamas insiders need the best care around, to which Zionist Entity do they turn?"] via these Haniyeh sound bites:

• “The Hamas movement has always stressed the need to oppose and combat all forms of official and popular normalization with the Zionist enemy" [Official Hamas statement quoted in Times of Israel, November 1, 2012]
• Hamas would never acknowledge the Israeli state, said Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian movement in Gaza, on Friday in Tehran. "They (West) want from us to stop resistance and acknowledge Israel but I herewith announce that this will never happen...  [Haaretz, February 11. 2012]
• Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh thanked Egypt and Iran on Thursday for their support in helping make “Israel scream with pain...”  [Times of Israel, November 22, 2012]
• The only path in the Palestinian struggle against Israel is the path of armed resistance, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said during a visit to Iran on Monday, adding that the "gun is our only response to Zionist regime." [Haaretz, February 13, 2012]

A man who knows what comes first [Image Source: Reuters]

It makes sense to us that the medical care given to another Haniyeh gets reported and discussed. Medical privacy is a high value. But there is a significant learning moment here - one which, if properly publicized to the Gazan Arabs and their Palestinian Arab kin might radically change the suspicions, conspiracy-spinning and hatred they channel at us. 


We again wish the people of Gaza better times, better health, better lives. And we also wish them - and ourselves - a complete and rapid separation from that iron-fisted, ideologically-crazed cursed Islamist leadership which never hesitates to impose cruel hardships, high infant mortality, horrible medical care and massive managerial indifference on their own society while reserving to its own well-connected insiders the privilege of efficiently engaging with the Zionist Entity when it suits them personally.

And a final thought: when thugs like Haniyeh scream to the outdoor rallies and - from the underground bunkers they have arranged for themselves in the hidden bunkers buried deep within the concrete bowels of Gaza's own miserable hospitals - whip up the frenzies of the men with the guns and the rockets, do they want their downtrodden masses to know how really ineffective the Zionist genocide machine is?