Behind a modest desk with a view of Beit Jala sits a nameless Shin Bet security service officer who is very pleased with himself. He has just saved the Jewish people in Israel from yet another grave security risk by preventing a 47-year-old woman, for five weeks now, from going abroad for urgent medical tests.
Or perhaps this isn't a story about just one officer, but rather about a committee of three. What matters is that Khalida Jarrar, a resident of Al-Bireh, has not gone to Amman for diagnostic brain tests that cannot be done in the West Bank due to lack of the necessary medical equipment.
I first wrote about Jarrar's case a month ago. On July 19, a doctor in Ramallah informed her she could obtain the necessary tests in either Israel or Amman. The Palestinian Ministry of Health told her it would not pay for the tests to be done in Israel.
Jarrar, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was refused permission to leave in 2008, when she was supposed to participate in the intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo. But until getting that note from her doctor, she had never fought for her right to freedom of movement.
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