Patients’ Waiting at Beit Hanoun “Erez” Checkpoint in the Gaza Strip Under the Israeli Occupation: Let Live or Let Die

This paper examines the politics of life and death at Erez “Beit Hanoun” border/checkpoint in Gaza, Palestine. It investigates how a health system that is subject to a debilitating siege affects patient care: many medicines cannot enter, medics are unable to travel for specialist training and patient exit permits (for treatment outside Gaza) are delayed or refused. The substance of the paper focuses on patients’ bodies’ waiting as a multiple space of hope or despair, not-belonging or not being ‘in-time’ with others – and often as a form of resistance or sumud. These contrasting emotions and states connect to the practice of waiting and are thus importantly spatial as they control and delimit the movement of bodies. This paper shows how the contemporary modes of governance controls people’s bodies and movements; however, their bodies can represent agency and power. My aim in this paper is to illustrate how patients experience eventual prospects of waiting, in clear terms: waiting for life (through permit to get treated) or waiting for death (through permit refusal). Based on first-hand accounts of patients and their families in Gaza on these stark prospects, I will argue that waiting produces a complex admixture of ‘cruel optimism’ and a form of sumud fused with both hope and despair.