Legal interventions by Gisha compel Israel to process and approve requests by Palestinians from Gaza to visit relatives with life-threatening medical conditions
February 13, 2019. In three recent cases, Israel only agreed to examine and approve permit applications by Gaza residents to see their dying first-degree relatives once Gisha initiated legal proceedings.
In one case, Gisha represented three sisters who live in the Strip. They had not seen their widowed mother, who lives in the West Bank, since 2013. The 84-year-old mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and heart disease. When she was hospitalized for respiratory failure, her daughters were notified that her condition was critical and that there was nothing the doctors could do for her. The three sisters submitted a permit application to visit their mother on her deathbed. Despite the great urgency of the matter, their application lay waiting for a response from Israeli authorities for an entire month. The day after a petition (Hebrew) in their matter was filed by Gisha, Israel granted the petitioners permits for a week-long visit in the West Bank.
A second story is that of a mother of eight, 53, who lives in the Strip and had submitted an application to visit her 63-year-old sister, who has Israeli citizenship and lives in Israel. The sister had been hospitalized at Sourasky Medical Center after suffering a stroke, and then again due to a life-threatening complication associated with diabetes. Here too, the state seemed in no rush to respond. Our client, who had not seen her sister since their brother passed away four years ago, grew concerned that they would never be able to see each other again. Shortly after the petition (Hebrew) was filed, Israel agreed to grant the petitioner a permit to visit her sister in Israel.
Gisha subsequently filed a request to the court to award costs in favor of the petitioner. In response, the state contended that it had no obligation to reply to permit applications before the deadline stipulated in the procedure on processing times of permit applications by Israeli authorities. In his decision (Hebrew) to deny a cost order in favor of the petitioner, Judge Gad Gidion accepted Israel’s claim whereby the timetables stipulated in the procedure on processing times for applications to visit sick relatives was reasonable given the volume of applications handled by Israeli authorities, and the complex screening process required to approve requests by “enemy subjects.” This decision ignores the fact that Gaza residents may only file an application to visit a first-degree relative if the relative is hospitalized or suffers a life-threatening condition. This means that overly lengthy processing times are likely to result in situations where the relative passes away before Israel provides a response to permit applications.
In a third recent instance, a 73-year-old widow living in Gaza submitted a permit application to visit her sister. In October 2018, her sister, a 68-year-old citizen of Israel, was hospitalized in Israel after suffering a stroke. She suffers from multiple chronic conditions and has lost her eyesight due to a diabetes-related complication. After a 57-day hospital stay, she was released. The right side of her body remains paralyzed; she is confined to a wheelchair, has trouble speaking, and is unable to care for her basic needs independently. The elderly sister in Gaza submitted the application in early November 2018, but it remained unanswered for a total of three months, and then was denied “because the patient […] is not hospitalized (hospital release letters were submitted).” That is, Israel was claiming that her application did not meet the stringent criteria for humanitarian visits for no other reason than its own failure to process the application in the time that had elapsed since the sister was hospitalized. Shortly after we submitted a petition (Hebrew) in her matter, the state reversed its decision and granted the petitioner a week-long permit.
When Gisha submitted a request for the court to issue a cost order in favor of the petitioner, the state’s response revealed that its grounds for denying her permit application initially were that the documents she had submitted in her second application were “low quality” copies. In its response to the cost request, the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA) claimed (Hebrew) that it had approved her permit based on the (better quality) versions of the documents that had been attached to the petition.
