The 10-acre, 500-bed hospital being built in northern Gaza was donated by the US nonprofit organization Friendship and is partially funded by Qatar.
In an op-ed published on October 2 in the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and translated by Palestinian Media Watch, columnist Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul writes that the hospital will “carry out experiments on sick Palestinians, and not treat them and care for their health… and it is possible that the hospital will be a partner in the trafficking of human organs.”
The writer goes on to explain that the hospital is run “by the CIA” and is part of “a humiliating agreement between the Hamas movement and the Israeli colonialism state… It is a tool to destroy the health of the Palestinian people.”
Hamas said the construction of the hospital is in the context of the ceasefire understandings reached with Israel last April, under the auspices of Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations.
Al-Ghoul, a regular columnist for Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, called US special advisor Jason Greenblatt a mongoloid in a piece he wrote in March. The paper cited "democracy and free speech" as the reasons why it would not apologize for publishing the column.
In a separate article also published in the PA paper, it was reported that the PA Ministry of Health said another one of the project’s goals is to prevent sick Palestinians from entering West Bank and East Jerusalem hospitals to receive treatment.
In March, the Palestinian Authority announced it would stop providing its citizens with medical treatment in Israel. This was its reaction to the Israeli decision to withhold $138 million in tax money from the PA, which is the implementation of the Jewish state’s “Pay-for-Slay” law that instructs it to deduct and freeze the amount of money the authority pays in salaries to imprisoned terrorists and families of “martyrs” from the tax money Israel collects for it.
The law was passed in July 2018 and was approved for implementation by Israel’s security cabinet this year.
“It is already preventing dozens of civilians from their right to treatment now,” the September 27 article claimed, “which has caused the death of many sick people as they await the required permits to enter the hospitals.”
However, Dr. Raz Somech, director of general pediatrics at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, told The Jerusalem Post in August that “There are no new Palestinian patients.”
Until then, Sheba had treated 150,000 West Bank and Gazan Palestinians since the Six Day War, a spokesperson for the hospital said.
PMW has in the past exposed similar PA libels, such as that Israel does medical experiments on prisoners and steals organs from dead terrorists.