The Australian charity seeking to rebuild critical healthcare in Gaza

bWhen Israel’s first retaliatory airstrike hit the Gaza Strip, Ron Finkel was already thinking two steps ahead. “We had to think ‘what happens the next day?’” says the founder of Australian charity Project Rozana International, which has been providing health care to Palestinians since 2013. “Whenever that day comes, we must respond to critical care needs.”

The charity is a fearful player within a group of aid and development organizations waiting for the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to reopen so they can send crucial aid and plan to rebuild what has been lost.

Project Rozana has submitted a proposal to the Australian government to fund what the charity believes it can do to help: build a triage hospital in partnership with the Red Crescent Hospital (Red Cross) in Gaza and upgrade the twenty ambulances. Only four hospital ambulances are equipped to transport the injured.

The hope is that the triage hospital can determine whether a patient can get the care he needs in Gaza’s hospitals, or whether the level of care he needs requires going to a hospital in East Jerusalem or Israel is being brought.

It also wants to expand its current bus fleet to help transport seriously ill Gazans to hospitals in East Jerusalem.

“The initiative is to achieve something measurable, practical and impactful,” says Finkel. “And also something that makes Australians feel like they are contributing and making a difference.

“We want to get this started as soon as the opportunity arises.”

On Saturday, Foreign Minister Penny Wong announced $10 million in initial humanitarian funding to help Palestinians in Gaza, including $3 million to the Red Cross and $7 million to the United Nations.

The Australian Council for International Development has urged the Australian government to also call for a ceasefire, which council CEO Marc Purcell said is “the only way humanitarian access can be achieved” under the circumstances and civil protection can be maintained”.

The government has called on Israel and Hamas to show restraint and protect the lives of civilians, but has not yet directly called for a ceasefire. On Monday, a resolution of the Russian Federation In the UN Security Council, the call for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza was rejected by France, Japan, the US and Britain.

Project Rozana International’s plan builds on the charity’s existing work to highlight the significant disparities between healthcare systems in Israel and Gaza. A core part of the work, through a network of Palestinian and Jewish volunteers, is to take seriously ill Gazans – especially children who do not have access to cancer or dialysis treatment in Gaza – to hospitals in East Jerusalem.

Former Australian of the Year Dr. Jamal Rifi, who works for the charity, says that since the escalation between Hamas and Israel began, none of the children the charity supports have been able to cross the border to receive dialysis or cancer treatment.

Israeli volunteers were supposed to meet the children and families at the border and then take them the rest of the way to the hospital — but the volunteer network has also disintegrated as the conflict escalated.

Rifi says he fears for the whereabouts of one of the volunteers, who lived in a kibbutz near the border and took the children to the hospital three times a week. They haven’t heard from her since the escalation started.

“We have a cohort of patients who have not been on dialysis for the last two and a half weeks and we need to be ready for when we can get them there,” Rifi says.

When Rifi heard the news of the Gaza hospital explosion, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry says killed at least 500 people and which both Israel and Hamas deny was the cause, he said he felt physically ill, in primarily because of the loss and its consequences. neglect of life. It was also another blow to a health care system that, before the conflict, was already “doing the best with what little it had.”

“Palestinians are resilient people,” says Rifi. “The doctors work hard and don’t do it for the money, but out of love for the profession.

“Without a doubt they will continue to work until they are exhausted, but we must be ready to relieve them.”