FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM Before leaving the house with the backpack and traveling to the mountains to the north, he wanted to write: “I do not accept your lines whether they are green or purple, I am an eternal nomad”. So alone she crossed both border colors: between the West Bank and Israel, between Israel and Syria. The girl arrived on the evening of February 1 in the Druze village of Majdal Shams on the Golan Heights and the next morning she sneaked into that no-man’s land patrolled by the military, which in some places remains without fencing or surveillance cameras.
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On the other hand, she was arrested by the Syrian secret police, who understood that they had not caught a spy but also understood that they had a possible exchange value in their hands. The negotiations began with the mediation of the Russians, supporters of the dictator Bashar Assad in Damascus and at the same time on good terms with the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. The premier spoke with Vladimir Putin, his emissaries moved, without fanfare the girl was transferred to Moscow and on Friday she returned home on a private jet.
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Without too much publicity, also because the government has only released some parts of the agreement until yesterday. The young woman lives in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Modi’in Illit and had already fled from her family to try to enter the Gaza Strip and Jordan. To obtain her release, Israel agreed to commute the sentence for a Druze accused of inciting violence and freed two Syrian shepherds who also ended up on the other side of the armistice line in the middle of those meadows where the borders seem only pastures.
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The rumors about the thorniest detail of the agreement emerged abroad and at that point the Israeli military censorship also allowed local media to publish the secret parts. Netanyahu allowed to pay “millions of dollars” – according to the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth – for hundreds of thousands of doses of the Russian-produced Sputnik vaccine to be passed on to Assad. Hypothesis now denied only by Sana, the regime’s propaganda agency: he argued that it would be an attempt to present Israel “as generous”.
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Haaretz, the left-wing newspaper, acknowledges to Netanyahu that the great diplomatic experience and personal relationships with international leaders (in this case Putin) have led to this humanitarian success. At the same time, the editorialist Amos Harel points out: «In recent years he has not managed to obtain from Hamas the release of the two civilian prisoners in Gaza and the return of the remains of two soldiers killed during the war of summer 2014. It is inevitable. that the vaccine issue enters negotiations with Hamas and is likely to involve the Palestinian Authority as well. Up to now a few thousand doses have been distributed in Gaza or the West Bank and have never arrived from Israeli stocks ».
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The Netanyahu government has for now agreed to inoculate 100,000 Palestinians who come to work in Israel. Doctors and scientists at the Ministry of Health are pushing to overcome the political-diplomatic stalemate and propose coordinating the immunization operations: “We live in a shared space, the spread of Covid-19 among Arabs risks reducing the effectiveness of our vaccination campaign “.
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February 20, 2021 (change February 20, 2021 | 21:12)
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