Less than 160 km. from Damascus, a Syrian rebel lies in a hospital bed, an Israeli sentry at the door. Nearby a Syrian mother sits next to her daughter, shot in the back by a sniper.
What started this year as a trickle is now a steady flow of Syrians, scores of civilians and fighters wounded in the civil war and being discreetly brought across the Golan front line into Israel.
For all the advantages it brings of excellent medical care, it is a journey fraught with risk for those who fear the wrath of President Bashar Assad’s government.
“There was one man, where I am from, who was treated in Israel. The regime forces killed his three brothers,” the teenage girl’s mother said. “They will kill my sons and my husband if they ever find out we were here.”
For fear of retribution back home, Syrians in Israeli clinics who spoke to Reuters asked not to be named.
The woman’s 16-year-old daughter, whose wounds have left her paralyzed in both legs, lies stone-faced as an Israeli hospital clown juggles and dances, trying in vain to raise a smile.
For the past month, she has been at Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya, on the Mediterranean coast, about 80 km. west of the UN-monitored cease-fire line on the Golan Heights that has kept Israeli and Syrian forces apart since the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
A few weeks ago, a battle was raging in her home village between Assad’s forces and rebel fighters. There was a lull, her mother said, and the girl opened the front door to see if it was safe out. Her aunt told her to shut it again, because there was a sniper in the house opposite. As she did so, he shot her.
“I saw her falling to the floor, in all the blood,” her mother recounted. “I was terrified I was going to lose her. I said, ‘Please, I don’t want to bury my children one by one.’” The girl was rushed to a rebel field hospital, where Syrian medics removed a bullet lodged in a lung. But they could not provide the further care she needed. The girl, they said, should be taken across the border, to Jordan or to Israel.
“We would get Israeli television channels in my village. I knew that medicine here is advanced,” the mother said. “In Jordan I would have to pay for it and we do not have enough money. Here it is free.”
The woman declined to say exactly how she and her daughter reached the Israeli lines on the Golan so that soldiers could transport them to hospital. She did say that Syrian rebel fighters helped them reach the area of the Israel-Syria front.
Of the population of about 20 million, one third is displaced, either inside or outside Syria.
Israel refuses to accept refugees from a country with which it is at war. But it does provide medical care, and it has made no secret of doing so.
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