The Israeli Jewish public is supporting the destruction of Palestinian healthcare

Faisal Nasrallah visits his 14-year-old son, Oday Nasrallah, at a hospital in the West Bank city of Jenin, September 2025

Amira Hass writes in Haaretz on 13 August 2026:

The majority of Israel’s Jewish public supports the worsening conditions of Palestinian patients, caused by their inability to receive necessary treatments. This isn’t the finding of any pollster – no one includes in their surveys a question like, “Do you support the elimination of Palestinian public healthcare?”

Yet this conclusion is inevitable, considering the fact that Israel’s Ministry of Finance continues unimpeded to steal the Palestinian Authority’s income from taxes and customs. Those revenues are meant for medical treatments, medications, medical staff salaries and the maintenance and development of hospitals and clinics.

The rabbis of the ultra-Orthodox parties didn’t search for and didn’t find, in the Talmud or the sayings of the rebbes, any references to protest the denial of medical treatment to those of God’s creatures that aren’t Jewish. The leaders of the Zionist opposition parties won’t say a word that might alienate a single, imaginary, former Bibi-ist voter – and in any case, most of them were complicit in the same plunder of the Palestinian treasury when they were in government.

Antisemitism researchers are paid to count swastikas carved on Jewish graves around the world, and to categorize politicians accusing Israel of genocide as Jew-haters. It’s not in their job description to be shocked by the agonizing deaths of Palestinians after their Health Ministry can’t buy medication for a treatable disease, as ordered by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The Israeli Medical Association has issued a single letter of protest against the policy. That letter was on the heels of calls by international health organizations to boycott the association, since it didn’t oppose the war of annihilation in Gaza. I’d be happy to be wrong on this, but I can’t recall any economists from top Israeli institutions signing any sort of concerned petition regarding the confiscation of PA funds.

The “left-wing” attorney general hasn’t uttered a single word of objection to the theft. The media knows that there’s no public interest in any Palestinian matters beyond “the elimination of a Nukhba terrorist.” Therefore, the media won’t even refute the propaganda that the Palestinian Authority funds terror.

The “Kaplanists” and “Balfourists” miss their days of mass protests against Netanyahu and the judicial overhaul. They’re not bothered by marginal issues, like the systematic sabotage of the complex of Palestinian social services, especially health and education, and the very collapse of the Palestinian Authority. They’re not even motivated by the fact that the architect of the collapse is a senior figure in the camp that paved the way for the judicial overhaul – Religious Zionism, if anyone forgot.

And so, due to the official policy of plunder which has plunged the PA’s Health Ministry into enormous debt, cancer and heart patients don’t get all the medications they need, and can’t buy them on the private market.

A stone’s throw from Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital, kidney transplant patients can’t get anti-rejection medications, and dialysis patients have to postpone sessions due to checkpoints and because the machine has run out of fluid. Blood tests aren’t taken, because the laboratories are operating at an eighth of the capacity. Medical equipment is out of service because there’s no money to repair it or get spare parts, or because technicians only come once a week.

Minutes away from Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, pregnant women can’t get regular monitoring. Orthopedic surgeries are constantly postponed, pharmacy owners fall into debt (they can’t refuse being paid in credit), and doctors can’t even afford their commutes to work more than once a week.

I haven’t forgotten: Every day, the army, the Civil Administration and settlers expel more Palestinians from their land through a cooperative planned policy – some burn and beat, others issue orders and send bulldozers. It’s naive to expect a wave of protests in Israel over missing medications in Palestinian warehouses as a result of a remarkably calculated Israeli policy. It’s childish to hope for an opposition that would commit to returning the stolen funds to their rightful owners.

I know it’s not mature of me to expect a large Jewish public, one unshocked by the deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, to be shocked by the Finance Ministry’s targeted destruction of Palestinian public healthcare, and through a domino effect, also the collapse of nongovernmental and private healthcare.

That same public doesn’t view as its problem the fact that most residents of the shrunken Strip are now living on the verge of hunger and thirst. It’s not alarmed by the clever bureaucracy organized by Israeli officers and officials in the civil coordination system, which is preventing the consistent delivery of medications, painkillers and anesthetics to the sick and wounded in the Strip, and preventing the severely ill and wounded patients from leaving abroad.

This is the same public that’s still convinced senior Israel Defense Forces commanders acted correctly when they ordered the mass and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians to kill Hamas operatives. It’s still convinced the army acted correctly when it destroyed, and erased from the face of the earth, cities, refugee camps, villages and farmland.

With great pain, you have to conclude that, in the eyes of too many Jews in Israel, also the slow killing of Palestinians, simply because they are Palestinians, is a legitimate policy.

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