'She can go give birth with Arafat'
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 19 September 2003
This is a bad tale that ends well. This story began exactly like Rula Ashtiya's - the Kafr Salem woman in labor whose story was told here last Friday: another woman stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint on her way to the hospital. Rula Ashtiya testified that she gave birth on the ground at the checkpoint next to her village, while hiding like an animal from the soldiers behind a cement block. Suzanne Alann spent more than three hours navigating checkpoints last week, as border police refused her passage, time after time, until she gave birth in a checkpoint zone, in the back seat of the taxi she was riding in, in full view of whoever happened by.
Rula's baby girl died a few minutes after birth; Suzanne's son, who was luckier, was rushed by an Israeli ambulance to a hospital, and survived. This week, little Mohammed scrunched up his face, yawned, hiccuped, blinked his eyes - a four-day-old baby, a checkpoint child, born in a yellow Palestinian taxi on the road by the Jaba checkpoint. Mother and child are both doing well.
They had moved in with an aunt, after long-standing unemployment left them unable to pay their rent. A young couple with four children, crowding into two rooms at Ashraf's mother's sister's house. Shuafat is a nice neighborhood in East Jerusalem, by the road going up to Ramallah, with houses of stone, some of them elegant. Ashraf Alann, a construction worker, is 27; Suzanne is 24. He's from the neighborhood, she's from the Wahdat refugee camp in Jordan. They married in 1997 and since then she's been here, waiting for "family unification" to afford her legal resident status. Meanwhile, Suzanne is here on her Jordanian passport, raising her children "illegally," like so many others: Yasser, five; Yusra, three; Bushra, 18 months; and newborn Mohammed. The first three were born in a hospital in East Jerusalem, "and I brought Mohammed into the world," jokes Ashraf, but his face sobers immediately.
Last Tuesday, the whole family went to visit his parents in al-Jeeb, a nearby village, with a checkpoint between the two. They decided to stay the night with his parents, not guessing it would be such a fateful decision. Suzanne went into labor at around 4 A.M. At about 5 A.M., they left the house on foot, in the dark. About a month earlier, the IDF had banned Ashraf's car because he'd given an uncle, a resident of the territories, a ride on a road where Palestinians aren't permitted.
After a short walk, they managed to hail a taxi that took them to the A-Ram checkpoint. They were headed for the Red Crescent hospital on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. Suzanne was supposed to give birth there, the hospital where Yusra and Bushra had been born. It was nearly 6 A.M. when they reached the checkpoint.
A long line of cars was waiting at the checkpoint, which is usually crowded at six in the morning. They got out and walked past the line of cars to the checkpoint, about 500 meters ahead. Ashraf approached a border policeman and showed his blue (Israeli) ID card. The policeman, he says, checked the ID and said: "Go ahead. And who's this?" "That's my wife, she's about to give birth," replied Ashraf, while Suzanne stood there, clutching her belly on account of the labor pains. "So what," said the policeman, according to Ashraf.
Ashraf remembered that he had proof: a letter inviting his wife to be at the hospital on Wednesday, September 10 - that very day. "God be praised," he thought. Hoping his troubles were now over, he showed the policeman the letter. "So what, go back," he remembers the policeman saying. Would he "do them a favor," Ashraf asked, but the soldier refused: "Whether I have children or not, I'm not doing any favors." When Ashraf asked to speak with the commanding officer, the soldier said he was the CO, Ashraf says. "So do us a favor and let her pass," he begged again.
"Let your wife go give birth in Ramallah. She can go give birth with Arafat," said the soldier.
Another border policeman showed up then, Ashraf remembers, and started berating him - "What're you making a fuss about?" - and pushed him aside. The CO told his colleague to stop, but paid no attention to Ashraf's pleas. "I don't do favors for Arabs," Ashraf remembers the soldier saying. "All Arabs are the same and I don't do them any favors. Bring me an Israeli ID card and she can pass."
He asked the soldier to look at Suzanne, who was doubled over, grasping her swollen abdomen in pain. The policeman, speaking Arabic, whispered to Ashraf to call an ambulance and then they would let him pass. Ashraf asked the commander about calling an ambulance, and he says the reply was: "Even if you bring a helicopter, the woman is not going through here." Ashraf now understood that it was hopeless. He, his sister (who had come with them, and who also has an Israeli identity card), and his wife retreated without further protest, heading for the footpath used by many people to circumvent the checkpoint.
Suddenly, a border policeman was there. "God damn him," muttered Ashraf to himself, trudging with his wife on the dirt path. Seeing the young, bearded Palestinian man carrying a tote bag (with the baby clothes for the birth), the policeman hastily aimed his rifle at Ashraf. The two women were terrified. Ashraf quickly held out his blue ID card, calling out to the policeman: "This is my wife, she's having her baby any second now." To which the policeman replied, cocking the trigger: "Any second now I'm going to fire."
"But I live here."
"Go through the checkpoint; only at the checkpoint."
Two more border policemen arrived, also with weapons aimed. Suzanne collapsed on the ground and Ashraf says he was shaking with fear. "I thought, he's going to shoot me now. If I get one centimeter closer, he's going to shoot."
The policeman told him to open the bag. Ashraf took out the baby clothes and held them up. "For the baby. She's giving birth."
"Go to the checkpoint," commanded the soldier. The three headed back. Suzanne's labor pains were worse. They decided to outflank Jerusalem on the east and try to get to the hospital via Anata, more than half an hour's drive, not including unscheduled checkpoint delays.
They stopped an East Jerusalem taxi with yellow (Israeli) plates, and went north, toward Ramallah. At the Qalandiyah checkpoint they got out, went east, and took a Palestinian yellow taxi toward Jaba. Now, on a map offered by Physicians for Human Rights investigator Ibrahim Habib, Ashraf traces their tortuous progress: Here's the A-Ram checkpoint, here's Qalandiyah, here's Jaba. It's the land of a thousand checkpoints.
They rode a few minutes and encountered a roadblock. A Jeep was parked there on the road, blocking about 50 cars waiting to pass. "The child is coming out," said Suzanne from the back seat, and Ashraf asked the driver to keep going. From behind the taxi, a bullhorn: "Pull over and stop." A border police Jeep. Ashraf got out immediately and told them, "Come see, it's my wife." She was lying on the back seat. The policeman understood right away, and the Jeep's driver told the cabbie to follow him and then told the soldiers at the checkpoint to let them through.
A few meters past the checkpoint, Suzanne said she couldn't wait. The bumpy road was agony; she asked them to stop. "I'm about to give birth," she said. The driver pulled over. Ashraf, at his wit's end, thought his wife had fainted. "I said to myself, that's it, I've lost them both. I gave up. Oh God, oh God." The driver told him to dial 101 and call Magen David Adom. He shouted into the phone: "Hurry, or my wife is going to die and it'll be your responsibility." In only a few minutes - "it was like a few hours," says Ashraf - the MDA ambulance arrived.
It was about 8 A.M. The baby's head had already crowned. "She was embarrassed. People going through the checkpoint were seeing her like that," continues Ashraf. "She managed not to scream at all." The doctor helped Suzanne through the rest of the birth, there on the back seat of the cab, and the baby received initial care in the ambulance. The cab's back seat was full of blood. Another ambulance was called to rush them to the hospital. At 8:30 A.M., three-and-a-half hours after they left home, they were at the hospital with little Mohammed in their arms.
From Border Police spokeswoman Liat Perl: "The incident was checked; there's no record of it. We conducted an extensive clarification with the border police unit at the A-Ram checkpoint; the soldiers and commanders know nothing of the incident. There are two options: Either she wasn't having serious labor pains and they were just asking to go through and weren't allowed because she didn't have the proper permits - and that's why no one remembers the incident as unusual. Or, it wasn't at the A-Ram checkpoint and they weren't border policemen. In any case, I haven't identified this incident.
"Remember that on that day, the day after two bombings [in Jerusalem and Tzrifin], lots of people wanted to get through and weren't allowed because there was an order for complete closure due to two very serious alerts. That may also be why the unit doesn't remember the incident.
"Our fighters are instructed that when a wounded person, a woman in labor or a sick person arrives, they must speak to the checkpoint commander. The soldiers themselves don't decide who will get through. That's why it's strange that someone makes an allegation like this ... If something like that happened and we don't know about it, that's very serious."
From the spokesman's office at the IDF, which is responsible for West Bank checkpoints: "The matter is under investigation. If the allegations are found to be correct, those involved will be treated with the utmost severity."