Israeli forces enter a rehabilitation hospital in Bethlehem and beat people in its courtyard
The Palestinian Ministry of Health has asked the World Health Organization and the Red Cross to step in, saying entries onto medical premises have become a pattern rather than an exception.
Local sources in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, said Israeli forces moved onto the grounds of the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation Hospital on Monday evening, frightening patients and visitors and beating people in the hospital courtyard.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health condemned the entry in a statement issued the same day, and framed it as one more instance of what it called continuing violations against the sanctity of hospitals and medical centres.
It said health facilities carry explicit protection under international law, and that entering one, assaulting anyone inside it or taking any step that puts patients and medical staff at risk is a serious breach of that protection.
The ministry added that conduct of this kind cuts directly into the delivery of care and takes from patients the right to be treated somewhere safe.
It renewed an appeal for intervention to two bodies by name, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Health Organization, asking each to act on its mandate and halt what the ministry described as recurring incidents against hospitals, medical facilities and health workers.
Neither the local sources nor the ministry put a number on how many people were assaulted, or said whether any of them needed treatment afterwards.
Rehabilitation is delivered in long courses of repeated visits rather than in single admissions, so the cost of an episode like this is not measured only in the hours it lasted. It reaches the calculation each patient makes before the next appointment, in a service whose results depend on people coming back.