That’s how 25-year-old Ibrahim Abu Safiya described the moment he saw someone lying on the ground near an Israeli checkpoint on the outskirts of Beit Sira village, west of Ramallah.
“We approached the man lying on the ground, and he looked terribly ill,” Abu Safiya told Middle East Eye.
“He had an extremely high fever. He could barely move his body and he was struggling to breathe,” Abu Safiya said.
The man lying on the ground was a Palestinian labourer who works in Israel. He told Abu Safiya that he had been showing signs of the coronavirus over the past four days, and was recently tested for the virus. That test later came back negative.
But before the man, allegedly a resident of Nablus, could receive his test results, his Israeli employer reportedly called the authorities, who picked him up and dropped him on the other side of the Beit Sira checkpoint, which connects central Israel and the occupied West Bank.
“He told us that they just threw him here on the ground and left him,” Abu Safiya recounted.
“How could they do this to someone?” he asked. “It shouldn’t matter if he’s Palestinian, Israeli, or whatever. He’s a human being.”
Just days earlier, Israel had approved the entry of thousands of Palestinian labourers into the country, under the condition that they had to stay in Israel for at least a month to prevent the spread of the virus in the West Bank.
Source: MEE
