The first infrastructures appeared in early December: beige canvas storage tents and huge blue containers, visible from the long screened corridor that links the Israeli crossing point of Erez to the Gaza Strip. Close to this logistics camp, figures are busy to erect other tents on the sandy ground. Established a few dozen meters from the concrete wall separating the Palestinian enclave from Israel, this mobile clinic, which is being set up, is already causing controversy among the Palestinians.
Funded by an openly pro-Israel American Evangelical Christian organization, the project has received approval from the Hebrew State and Hamas, the Islamist movement that has controlled the Gaza Strip since 2007. The other political factions present in Gaza as well as the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank categorically rejects this future field hospital, considering it a first-rate political and security threat.
In Gaza, little is known about "the American hospital." The date of its opening and the duration of its mandate are unknown while the site, closed, is prohibited to the public. Humanitarian organizations in Gaza, local and international, know nothing about the association Friends Ships, which is behind the project. In the region, it intervened in 2017 on the part of the Golan occupied by Israel. As part of Operation Good Neighbor, coordinated by the Israeli army in 2013, its volunteers treated Syrian civilians and fighters from the Syrian armed opposition supported by the Hebrew state.
"Nothing to do with Israel"
The Friend Ships clinic in Gaza will include a dozen medical services, notably in pediatrics, oncology or to treat post-traumatic stress disorder from which almost the entire population of the enclave suffers. Open Monday through Thursday, it will have a large children's play area as well as a distribution center for food, medicine and clothing.
Something new, it is located in the buffer zone, access to which is generally limited by the Israeli army. The latter and the department which coordinates the civilian activities of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories – the Cogat – refuse to speak on the hospital, claiming that he has not "Nothing to do with Israel". Cogat admits, however, that coordination for the movement of material from Israel is ensured via the Kerem Shalom crossing point.
