War Day #320 One Dead Gazan Child

Wednesday, August 21

Next year, there will be a very sick child in Gaza who will die without medical help.

Hamas has an annual budget of 2 billion dollars, thanks to international aid. Hamas’s top leaders - now-deceased Haniyeh, Marzouk and Mashaal - have cumulative bank accounts exceeding $11 billion dollars.

Hamas doesn’t bother to spend their billions of international aid on civilian services like fancy hospitals. #priorities

So it is Israelis who provide dying Gazan children with lifesaving medical care. Sick Gazan children are routinely taken across the border to Israel for their treatment, in much the same way that during the Syrian civil war, injured Syrians were abandoned on the Israeli border, until Israelis picked them up, hauled them across the border to the closest hospital where Israeli surgeons operated on them, and then delivered them back to the border, good as new. Never mind that Syrians were the enemy.

But next year, although his family will deliver the very sick Gazan child to the Israeli border, there will be no one to pick him up and bring him to his critical medical care.

Because Chaim Peri is no longer alive.

Chaim Peri’s body was one of the six recovered yesterday, after 319 days in captivity in Gaza. Chaim was an activist who dedicated his life to promoting peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. He was a father of five, grandfather of 13. He was 79. He lived on Kibbutz Nir Oz, which lost 55 members to the October 7 massacre, with 22 still in captivity, condition unknown, thanks to the Red Cross which hasn’t bothered to check.

Chaim saved his wife’s life on October 7, before he was himself abducted by Hamas terrorists.

And he volunteered with a program called Road to Recovery, transporting sick children from Gaza to Israeli hospitals.

Who knows how many who used to do this righteous work were killed on October 7? The foreign journalists so quick to accept the Hamas casualty numbers don’t care to track the number of righteous Jews transporting underprivileged Palestinians to lifesaving medical care.

All we know is that now Chaim Peri won’t be able to transport those sick Gazan children anymore.

May his memory be for a blessing.

-30-

320 days held hostage.

But today, on the UN’s International Day of Remembrance and Tribute to the Victims of Terrorism, they don’t recognize Israelis held in Gaza.

Shame on you.

320 days. Let them go.

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