Gaza hospital continues to serve people, despite financial difficulties

From Ekklesia-

On a recent sunny day in Gaza, mothers and their children waited on benches on the manicured campus outside of Al Ahli Arab Hospital to receive care from a hospital-run programme that offers three-months of services to 750 children up to the age of five - writes Lynette Wilson.

The nourishment programme is just one of the many outpatient services the non-profit, public hospital operated by the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem has continued as it transitions into a specialty hospital and weathers financial difficulties exacerbated by a recent loss of funding.

“It is our witness as Christians to serve the poor,” said Suhaila Tarazi, the hospital’s director. “With all that is going on in Egypt [political turmoil] and Syria [civil war], to keep a place like this one, a Christian place like this one, it’s important.”

The hospital employs 110 people, 30 per cent of them women, and serves some 30,000 patients each year, 6000 of them in the free medical mission, she added.

On 2 January 2013, Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem Suheil Dawani, travelled from Israel to Gaza via the north’s Erez Crossing to see the hospital, meet with staff and to hold Eucharist in its chapel.

More here-

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/17791

Anglican Consultative Council reaffirms two-state solution for Israel, Palestine

The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) on May 9 unanimously re-affirmed its desire for a "robust peace process" in the Israel-Palestine conflict and a two-state solution.
The members passed a resolution that calls Israel's West Bank policies "a physical form of apartheid."

Anglican Church of Southern Africa Archbishop Thabo Makogba told the council that he supported the resolution "having lived under apartheid and knowing the pain of apartheid."

He described having seen "the brutality" in the West Bank and Gaza that "segregates God's people."

"If we vote for this resolution, we will be doing our Christians duty of ensuring that peace abounds in Jerusalem," he said.

Diocese of New York Bishop Suffragan Catherine Roskam told the council that "the average American thinks that the conflict in the Middle East is even … I think it falls to Christian minds and to this communion to point out that it is not 50-50." She said Israel uses tanks, automatic weapons and bulldozers against people who fight back with stones.

"It should not cause us to be surprised when as a last resort people strap explosives to themselves and use themselves as human bombs," she said. "I decry all violence, but unless we are willing to speak for justice … these tensions will continue to increase."

More-

http://www.episcopal-life.org/79901_107457_ENG_HTM.htm