And The Twins Died

[Violet_Crumble]

By Gideon Levy
Haaretz.com
10 January, 2004

The twin girls died one after the other. The first to die was the one who was born first, at the checkpoint. Several hours later came the death of her sister, who was born a few minutes after they finally left the checkpoint, and who managed to reach the hospital alive. One lived for less than an hour, the other for less than a day. The death certificate lists their ages as one day old and zero. One died in the arms of her grandmother, the other was carried in the arms of her aunt, while their mother was lying in an ambulance, freezing, trembling, exhausted and humiliated after what she had gone through at the IDF checkpoint near her village.

This past Sunday, the two bespectacled soldiers at the checkpoint at the entrance to Deir Balut direct us with unusual politeness to the path through the fields that leads to the village. The asphalt road to the village is regularly closed off with cement blocks and barbed wire, despite the fact that there is a manned checkpoint at the other end. Why is travel forbidden on the main road, and allowed only on the rocky path? Only in order to subject the 4,000 residents of this attractive village to further mistreatment, and to pacify the settlers in the area, residents of Paduel, Alei Zahav and Beit Aryeh, who whiz past on the well-paved Jewish roads.

Lamis, 25, Raad, 36, and Sabaa, 15 months old. A young and attractive couple with a daughter, a house in the village and horses in the yard. They married five years ago. Raad studied accounting for four years in Bombay, India, worked as a croupier in the casino in Jericho and is now unemployed, and makes a little money from agriculture, in his family's olive grove. A tattered black leather jacket and gel in his hair. The couple was eagerly awaiting the birth of the twins that Lamis was carrying. She was in her seventh month, and they knew that she was about to give birth.

It happened about two and a half weeks ago, on the night of December 21, a particularly cold night. Shortly after 1 A.M. Lamis woke Raad. She had contractions. Raad went outside, borrowed a car from a neighbor and drove to Zawiya, the neighboring village, to his wife's doctor, to get a letter of referral for the government hospital in Ramallah. The hospital in Nablus is closer, but the road is full of checkpoints, and for the hospital in Ramallah he needed a referral. The doctor gave him the letter and promised to order an ambulance from the infirmary in Beit Rima, about 20 kilometers from Deir Balut. Raad returned home, picked up his wife, and together they drove in the neighbor's car on the rocky road, in the direction of the village checkpoint. His sister and his mother joined them for the journey.

http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-levy100104.htm

[Scurrilous]

1. Deir Ballut?

...2 1/2 weeks ago? Sounds familiar.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=124&topic_id=41156

The Death of Newborn Twins from Deir Ballut

Resistance posted this thread on 12/23. At the time, some called this story an outright lie. They said the source wasn't credible. I wonder what they say now?

On edit: Reading this story has made me sick at heart. I'm going to log off and go hug my kid. Goodnight.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Violet_Crumble]

3. Thanks for the link...

It was an eye-opener reading that thread. My guess is that the reaction now of the loudest of those calling the story a lie would be complete silence...

Yeah, I got upset reading about what happened. My heart went out to that woman for the loss of her babies, the needless humiliation she endured, and that some folk were more than happy to smear her by saying her story wasn't true...

Violet...

[newyorican]

4. nice link...

very revealing...

[Name removed]

6. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[bluesoul]

7. Yeah

me too!

[Blitz]

8. This timeline is interesting

Let's take out all of the extraneous details about the husband's time in India and his job as a croupier and how attractive the couple looked and look at the timeline. According to the ambulance driver,

"Shortly after 1 A.M. Lamis woke Raad."

At this point Raad drove to Zawiya, woke up the doctor, explained the situation, got a letter of referral, drove back, picked up his wife, his mother and his sister and drove to the checkpoint. All of this took about an hour.

"It was shortly after 2 A.M."

Once at the checkpoint, Raad called the ambulance, which had not arrived yet.

They were at the checkpoint, according to Raad, between fifteen and 30 minutes and the ambulance did not arrive until after that time. Here, Raad's recollection diverges slightly from the Ambulance driver's, who claims that he received the initial call (from the doctor in Zawiya, probably) at 1:45 a.m. and arrived at just after 2:00 a.m. (about 20 minutes later) and waited 5 to 8 minutes before approaching the checkpoint on foot.

It was only after this that a jeep arrived with an IDF officer who had the key to the gate. This was less than an hour after Lamis and Raad arrived at the checkpoint. Apparently, the soldiers at the checkpoint could not have let them through if they wanted to before the officer arrived.

The officer arrived to find a woman being pushed under the locked gate on a stretcher. He asked for papers, which the ambulance driver "tried not to give." According to the driver, the fact that the soldiers insisted on seeing the papers delayed them a few more minutes. Then she was placed in the ambulance on the other side of the checkpoint.

This was still less than an hour after the woman and her family arrived, less than half an hour after the ambulance arrived and only minutes after the officer with the key to the gate arrived on the scene.

In the time estimates given by both Raad (an hour and a half) and the ambulance driver (an hour) they both apparently count the time when they were on the other side of the checkpoint but were stopped because Lamis was giving birth. The second infant was born just 10 kilometers (several minutes) later. Given that it took them about two hours to drive to the hospital from Deir Balut, both infants would have been born (and likely died) on the road even if there had been no checkpoint at all. Both infants weighed only about 3 pounds at birth, so their survival, even under ideal conditions, was hardly guaranteed.

That's it, folks. A family tragedy, turned into a propoganda piece. You want to blame somebody? Blame the unnamed doctor who sent a woman in labor to a hospital that was hours away rather than getting up off of his ass and helping her. Blame him for not diagnosing the situation as an emergency and admitting her to the maternity hospital right there in Zawiya rather than trying to avoid a difficult situation by sending her away. Blame him for not properly diagnosing the situation days earlier and not sendig the woman to the proper hospital so that she didn't have to try to race there in the middle of the night. Blame him for not coming back to Deir Ballut with Raad so that he could help the woman while she tried to get to the hospital.

Here is what happened from the Israeli soldier's perspective:

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., unknown persons arrive at the checkpoint. Shortly after arriving, they got out of the car and started walking towards the checkpoint or one of the residences near the checkpoint. The soldier turned the spotlight on them and ordered them to stop. At the same time, the officer in charge, who had the key to the gate, was called, woken up, and told to come to the checkpoint. Several minutes later, the persons returned to their car. Shortly thereafter, an ambulance arrived from the other side of the checkpoint. After a few minutes, the driver got out and moved towards the gate. He was told to stop but explained that there was a pregnant woman on the other side of the checkpoint. At that time, he and another man from the ambulance were allowed to crawl under the gate with a stretcher. Moreover, they were permitted to put the woman on the stretcher and push her under the (still locked) gate. At this point, the officer who had been called arrived and demanded to see the papers (including the document that Raad had received from the doctor) of the people going through the checkpoint. Once the papers were shown, they were permitted to go on their way.

Everybody looking for evidence of zionist monsters should probably look elsewhere. Here you'll find only common family tragedy, gross medical malpractice, bureaucratic inefficiency and cheap propoganda.

[Violet_Crumble]

9. No, not particularly...

As far as party tricks go, it's not all that original to take a news story, poke little holes in it, act like those supposed little holes are huge holes, and then dismiss the whole thing. It can be done to almost any story. What I find particularly disgusting about doing it in this particular case and ones similar to it, is that armed with nothing more than a few assumptions portrayed as fact, what happened to this woman has been twisted and twisted so that the implication is that her, her husband and the ambulance driver hate Israel so much that they'd put her life and those of her babies at risk in their quest to make the 'heroic' IDF troops involved look bad. Just curious, but have the troops in question given their perspective, or did you just make that bit up?

Nothing you said, either here or in the other thread where there were claims that the entire thing was a lie because it wasn't reported by a reliable source (guess Ha'aretz might have to go on the pile of unreliable, anti-Israel sources now, eh?), has been particularly convincing. That's probably because I'm neither looking for evidence of Zionist monsters, nor am I looking for evidence in between sending pizza to those brave souls, that the IDF are a bunch of really great heroes who rarely if ever do anything wrong. Considering that the article had a medical professional explaining why it's important for the birth of twins to happen in a hospital, I'd tend to take his expertise on the issue over yrs, sorry. Consider that there may well have been complications that the hospital that you INSIST she should have been taken to couldn't deal with, and that insistance becomes another red herring as far as I'm concerned. Unless yr very familiar with the hospital in question and what its capability was and whether it had room to take another admission that night, and even more familiar with the history of this woman's pregnancy, then yr claims aren't convincing at all, given that to believe what you put forward would lead to believing that the couple, ambulance driver, and doctors all intentionally put her and her babies at serious risk just to score a few propaganda points to try to make the squeaky-clean IDF look bad...

Incidents like this have hapened in the past, so there seems to be no dispute that this sort of thing does happen. Well, not unless anyone wants to try claiming that AI are liars...

What this incident highlights is how dangerous and irresponsible it is for there to be checkpoints where gates are locked and only one person has the key. And that's apart from the fact that the checkpoint shouldn't be there in the first place....

What I think you fail to understand is that the conduct of those troops that night was far from what should be expected of troops when faced with an emergency situation like that. And you attempted to make out they didn't even notice she was pregnant and in labour. That's a completely unbelievable thing, considering the article makes it clear that they were made aware of what was happening. I remember reading a story about an IDF troop a while back who assisted in the delivery of a Palestinian woman's baby. When I read this one here, it was like looking at the mirror-image of the other story. The one who assisted in the delivery of the baby was a hero, and you know why? Because they were doing their duty and showed the compassion and humanity towards a woman in labour that should be par for the course from all troops. Not the ones in this story here, though. They knew she was in trouble and all they could do to assist was threaten to shoot them and the ambulance driver. And the officer who supposedly had the only key to the gate deserves a huge thumbs-down from anyone with a shred of compassion. The complete 'Yes Minister' absurdity of wasting time with paperwork during an emergency situation would have been laughable if the end result of the whole mess wasn't so tragic...

Also, you have a problem with 'extraneous details' that give faces and depth to the people in this story? Do you also have that same problem over 'extraneous details' about victims of suicide bombings?

btw, just a small correction right at the start of yr expert rebuttal of the people involved and of Gideon Levy:

According to the ambulance driver,

"Shortly after 1 A.M. Lamis woke Raad."

Noooo, that wasn't according to the ambulance driver. That was according to Gideon Levy :)

[drdon326]

10. WRONG !!

Blitz diseected it and blew it out of the water.

Trying to blame the IDF is disingenous at best and perhaps
biased at worst. Those 'extraneous details' are what destroys the case.

I'm always amazed the lengths some people will go to try
to explain away the obvious.

so sad.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Gimel]

14. Seems to be common today

Unfortunately, misreading the facts to represent a society you want to believe in, does not, does not alter reality. It's a kind of denial, that in the long run, always hurts those who indulge in it.

[Violet_Crumble]

18. It does...

And in the case of the particular idiot who wrote that racist swill that don posted, the society he wants to believe in is one where children of asylum seekers are not Australians, but the dangerous 'them', who in different periods of time have been Vietnamese, Italians, or whatever group had a large number of immigrants coming to these shores. And it's been explained to don before that the Murdoch press in Australia was deliberately trying to fuel racism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the community because of the issue of asylum seekers here. Maybe he forgot when he posted this article? ;)

Violet...

[dudeness]

19. with all due respect drdon

it sometimes helps to understand the political agenda being run when posting an article from a well known right wing paper such as the australian..unfortunately I could not access the article in question to ascertain whom the scribe might be..but having said that this particular "rag" (my view only) has been totally supportive of mandatory detention of asylum seekers for indefinate periods of time..fully supportive of the illegal invasion of iraq and unquestioning of any decision made by our fearless leader little johnny howard..the background of the rapes in sydney, albeit, now sometime ago and I believe these felons are doing hard time..was an enormous story at the time and led to the departure of Police chief Peter Ryan..it was fanned by the usual shock jocks and redneck columnists of which every country has a share..the reason Ryan advocated more intelligent police was so as to increase pay on the basis of qualifications and because the the old NSW police was so corrupt it was mind boggling..having living in the west of sydney as a youth I can attest to its toughness as a neighbourhood but believe me, crime , particulary against women is not the sole domain of men of ME appearance just as crime in the US is not the sole domain of men of negro appearance..

[Violet_Crumble]

21. The scribe was Tim Priest...

A whistle-blower with an axe to grind with Peter Ryan...

You come from Sydney's west as well? I was born and raised in Canley Vale :)

Violet...

[dudeness]

22. thanks violet.

tim priest..omg!! don should check his sources..earlwood boy here..when I was there it was considered part of the west...

cheers

[bluesoul]

12. Hmmm

"I'm always amazed the lengths some people will go to try
to explain away the obvious."

Ditto for those denying that the IDF does ANY wrong...

[Gimel]

13. Blitz' points

Blitz raised very pertinent points about the decision to take the woman in labor to a hospital on the other side of the checkpoint in the middle of the night.

While it may have been the hospital she had planned to go to, it would have been wiser to go to the nearer hospital under the circumstances. No hospital would turn away a woman in labor, even if over crowded. There's always room in the corridors.

The story written by Mr. G. Levy, went to great lengths to give humanistic feel and background to the story so that the couple could be identified with or at least sympathized with.

I think that as a journalist, he wrote a human interest story from the news articles he read. Whether or not he presented the details correctly is unknown. He obviously was not present and could only gather information after the fact. It hardly seems likely that they had a scribe to take down the details as they happened, note the time for each event, etc.

[Violet_Crumble]

17. HOW????

In case you didn't notice, Blitz made a boo-boo in the very first part of his post, in and in no way blew the article out of the water for reasons that I explained. Of course, if you feel otherwise and have any reasons to believe otherwise, you can always explain how...

Sorry, but I'm not in the cheer-squad who believe that if IDF troops do something wrong they shouldn't cop some blame. And from this article, these troops didn't act in the way they should have when confronted with an emergency. Plus, of course, that checkpoint should never have been there in the first place...

The 'extraneous details' Blitz referred to was the background on the couple. How exactly did that destroy the case? The husband worked as a croupier in India, so that totally destroys the story??

After reading the other thread and now this one, I actually agree with you about the lengths some people will go to in order to explain away the obvious. Bringing up assumptions and presenting them as fact, pretending to have a familiarity with the medical history of this woman's pregancy, calling the article garbage without explaining why someone thinks it is - they're all examples of it...

So sad...

Violet...

[Blitz]

16. Your critique

like the original article, deals with everything but the facts.

Let's knock it down to basics.

Fact:

The woman went into labor shortly after 1:00 a.m.

Fact:

The pregnant woman, her husband, her sister in law and her mother in law left their home at around 2:00 a.m.

Fact:

After they left the checkpoint it took over 2 hours to get to the hospital in Ramallah.

Fact:

The first child was born at around 2:30 a.m.

Question:

If it takes 2 hours to get to the hospital at Ramallah and they left at 2:00 a.m., if there had been no delay at the checkpoint and they had driven straight through, where would the first child have been born?

Fact:

The second child was born minutes later.

Question:

If it takes 2 hours to get to the hospital at Ramallah and they left at 2:00 a.m., if there had been no delay at the checkpoint and they had driven straight through, where would the second child have been born?

That's it. Anyone who answers the two questions honestly will realize that it was medical incompetence and bad fortune that killed these children, not anything done by any checkpoint guards.

[Violet_Crumble]

20. Sorry, but I dealt with the facts...

And to be honest, a creative writing exercise giving a view from an IDF's troops perspective is NOT facts. You haven't yet provided a single fact to show that this story is false in any way....

Yr question is totally irrelevent as far as I'm concerned, because what yr trying to say is that because the babies would probably have died anyway, that negates the behaviour of the troops and the unnecessary delay at the checkpoint. Of course it doesn't. A young boy on a farm died over here because the phone company had disconnected the family's phone, and when he had a massive asthma attack, they couldn't ring for an ambulance. Does the fact that he probably would have died before an ambulance got there mean that the phone company is absolved on any blame for it's actions? Of course not, and at the time not even the phone company tried to argue that it did. And the same applies in this case...

So, if you want to provide some actual facts to prove that the troops didn't behave in the way they did, you'll be getting somewhere. Because whether or not those babies would have died (and no one at the time knew that they'd die when they did) doesn't wipe out the behaviour of the troops...

Violet...

[Muddleoftheroad]

15. Birth weight

Anytime you have premature infants who are barely three pounds in weight, their survival is a question. These poor unfortunate children were born just over that weight and were two months premature. Unless they are born under optimum conditions, they prognosis cannot be good.

[GabysPoppy]

23. From the reporting by CNN of today's suicide bomber

The woman had just entered the Israeli side of the border when she told Israeli security officials she needed medical attention, according to the sources. While Israeli officials were checking her for weapons, she burst into tears and detonated her explosives.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/01/14/israel.blast/index.html

Yet some will still condemn the IDF and checkpoints.

What "poetic license" will Gideon Levy use to report(?) this incident?

[Muddleoftheroad]

24. Some don't care

As long as Palestinians aren't inconvenienced.