Since September 2021, the cancer department at Augusta-Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem has been operating at a slower pace. Short of money, the establishment built on the Mount of Olives, one of the main centers of care in the occupied territories, can no longer receive new cancer patients. In total, nearly 500 Palestinians awaiting chemotherapy or other type of treatment have been turned away. The luckiest are taken care of in hospitals in the West Bank, less specialized, such as in Bethlehem or Nablus. The others are patient at home as their condition worsens.
“Many of these patients did not receive their treatment on time, or at all, since the situation is difficult in all the hospitals of the territories, not only in ours, deplores Fadi Al-Atrash, executive director of Augusta-Victoria. Lives are put in danger: patients may arrive late with more severe forms of cancer, some may die. »
One of the causes of this tragedy is several thousand kilometers from East Jerusalem, in Brussels, in an office on the ninth floor of the headquarters of the European Commission: that of the Hungarian Oliver Varhelyi, Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement , in charge, in this capacity, of the policy of international cooperation of the Twenty-Seven.
Since December, this follower of the nationalist Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary and cantor of “illiberalism”, has been holding hostage, almost single-handedly, European aid to Palestine. By deciding, against the opinion of a majority of member states, to condition the payment of part of this windfall to a revision of Palestinian school textbooks, ritually accused by pro-Israeli lobbies of inciting violence, Oliver Varhelyi has created a politico-institutional imbroglio which has, de facto, blocked all of this aid: 215 million euros.
“An absolute scandal”
The freezing of European Union (EU) funding, in addition to the non-restoration of American subsidies interrupted during the time of Donald Trump and the drying up of subsidies from Arab countries, has very concrete consequences. It contributes to a 20% drop in the salaries of Palestinian Authority (PA) civil servants since November, deprives 120,000 poor families of a quarterly allowance and destabilizes the entire hospital sector in East Jerusalem, recipient of 10 to 20 million euros out of the envelope of 215 million.
“This case is an absolute scandal, Varhelyi is pushing Hungary’s pro-Israel agenda without the slightest qualms, indignantly a diplomat from an EU member state, referring to the closeness between Orban and the former Prime Minister of the Hebrew State Benyamin Netanyahu. It is not conceivable to let the Commission take a decision contrary to the line of the Council of Foreign Ministers. » The EU press service did not respond to our requests for an interview with a person in charge of the Directorate General for Neighborhood and Enlargement (“DG Near”, in Brussels jargon).
You have 61.86% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
