Aid Groups Say Israel Impedes Relief Work

JERUSALEM -- The U.N. ambulance had just dropped off a patient in critical condition at a West Bank hospital and was headed back to a nearby refugee camp when it came under fire. One bullet narrowly missed the oxygen tank. A second came within inches of a nurse's head. A third entered the back of 43-year-old assistant Kamal Hamdan, piercing his aorta and killing him almost immediately.

"It was clearly gunfire from an Israeli position," Richard Cook, director of operations for the U.N. Relief Works Agency in the West Bank, said of the March 7 incident. "We had our flag lit with a floodlight; it was marked with a red cross and the U.N. emblem; we'd made several runs that day; and they knew we were in the area."

Arrests, deportations, visa and travel restrictions, checkpoint harassment, threats, injuries and deaths are among the impediments that humanitarian groups say they're facing at the hands of Israeli immigration and military authorities as they struggle to deliver food, medicine and humanitarian assistance to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "We in no way condone what is done from the other side with the suicide bombers and understand the Israeli need for security," Cook said. "If there's some sort of problem, show us the proof. But stop targeting our ambulances and stop killing our staff."