Dr. Ra'ad Haj Yehia, a member of the Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) organization, returned June 26 from the Gaza Strip. He says he still hasn’t recovered from the scenes he saw in the hospitals there. Yehia was summoned to Gaza by medical teams in the Strip who asked the PHRI organization “to come and save lives.”
Ever since Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas decided to sever the Palestinian Authority (PA) from the Strip and stop transferring money to it in April 2017, the health system in Gaza has been collapsing. The Gaza Health Ministry reported at the end of June on infants and children who died because the PA refused to underwrite life-saving medical treatment for them in Israel or other hospitals in the West Bank.