A British MP who was held in an ambulance at an Israeli military checkpoint for more than an hour after he suffered a stroke is to ask the Foreign Office to protest at his treatment.
Ian Gibson, the Labour MP for Norwich North, said that soldiers stopped him for about 90 minutes as they demanded he leave the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance taking him to an Arab-run hospital in East Jerusalem and take an Israeli ambulance.
"I was being quite violently sick at the time. I was pretty ill and I think they knew I was pretty ill. They could see I was vomiting and yet they insisted on this kind of treatment," he said at a Jerusalem hospital yesterday. "We had to keep waiting for a more senior officer to appear and so on. The feeling was that humanitarian care of the patient was way down the list and that they were making a point."
Palestinian ambulances are frequently delayed or turned back at checkpoints. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says at least 43 people have died in the past four years because ambulances were stopped or delayed. More than a dozen women have been forced to give birth at checkpoints, resulting in at least five stillbirths.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/forei...310679,00.html
09-23-2004, 11:52 AM
British MP furious
Linear Mode
