Wadi al-Haramiya (Arabic: وادي الحرامية, lit. 'Valley of Thieves') is a valley between Ramallah and Nablus on the West Bank.[1]

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was maintaining a checkpoint at Uyoun al-Haramiya (the Wells of Haramiya), near the Israeli settlement Ofra, manned by a reserve company.

Before dawn on the morning of March 3, 2002, the sniper positioned himself under some olive trees on a hilltop overlooking the checkpoint. At 6:40 he opened fire at the three soldiers manning the checkpoint and the driver of a civilian car, which had stopped at the checkpoint. All four were killed within minutes. Nine Israeli soldiers were inside a barracks building. Platoon commander Lieutenant David Damelin and the unit's medic Yochai Porat emerged from the building to locate the shooter and assist the casualties. Both were shot dead. The remaining soldiers decided to stay inside the building and called for reinforcements.[2]

A patrol jeep that arrived with reinforcements immediately came under fire. The reserve company's sergeant, Avraham Ezra, was killed and several of his men were injured. The rest of the casualties occurred when randomly arriving civilian cars stopped at the checkpoint. Three Israeli civilians and an IDF officer were killed.[2] Tha'ir Hammad claimed in an interview (obtained by unknown means from prison) that the Israelis were armed and that one of them took aim at him but that he shot first. He also claimed that he refrained from harming an Israeli woman and her children, shouting at her in Hebrew and Arabic to leave the area.[3]

Two of the Israeli civilians killed, Sergei Birmov, 33, and Vadim Balagula, 32, were killed when they stopped their car at the checkpoint, as they made their way to work at a candy factory in Jerusalem.[4]

The Israelis never succeeded in locating the sniper's hiding place even after dispatching a helicopter. He had intended to continue shooting but when he fired his 25th bullet the old rifle exploded, rendering it useless. He was thus forced to give up and return to his village. Seven soldiers, two of them officers, and three civilians were killed in the 25-minute attack. Another six Israelis were wounded, four of them seriously.[5]

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of the Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the attack. Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti praised the attack. "Blessed be the fighting hands of the heroes, who dealt these blows to the army of occupation," he said.[5]

The Israeli authorities assumed that the shooter was a highly trained marksman from an elite unit, such as Force 17.[2][6] The average Palestinian militant could not be expected to hit 16 targets with 25 bullets. Mossad also contacted European and American security agencies to help identify the killer. Mossad suspected that a member of the Irish Republican Army could be responsible for the act.[7] The sniper became a hero among local residents.

Haaretz veteran military correspondent Ze'ev Schiff called the incident "[o]ne of most stinging and bizarre fiascoes" of the IDF in the Second Intifada: "the entire incident can only be described as a massive blunder and a disgrace for the IDF. No excuse can be accepted. This sort of incident cannot be blamed on the lower ranks."[8] A series of investigations were carried out with the apparent purpose of exonerating the senior officers and putting the full blame on the soldiers at the checkpoint. The scandal led to a major overhaul of rules for IDF probes.[9]

The reasons for rejection are often “very vague, and they are conveyed informally. Sometimes they were very unreasonable,” said Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon.

The two senators said they saw a warehouse in Rafah filled with material that had been rejected in inspection. It included oxygen cylinders, gas-powered generators, tents and medical kits used in delivering babies.

Aid workers told the senators the tents were refused because they included metal poles, and the medical kits because they included scalpels. Most solar-powered equipment appears to be barred — though it is vital in Gaza, where central electricity has collapsed and fuel for generators is in short supply.

Obse patients have greater intra-operative blood loss, more complications and longer duration of surgery but pain and functional outcome are similar to non-obse patients. Based on these results, ob*sity is not a contraindication to lumbar spinal fusion.

Obse patients have greater intra-operative blood loss, more complications and longer duration of surgery but pain and functional outcome are similar to non-obse patients. Based on these results, ob*sity is not a contraindication to lumbar spinal fusion.

A common attempted “justification” for the healthcare inequalities that fat people face is the idea that fat people shouldn’t get the resources they need if they happen to need more resources than the average thin person. When added to a general focus on profit (especially in the US healthcare system) this leads to staff-to-patient ratios that make it impossible to correctly care for fat patients (for example, having adequate staff to safely turn patients to prevent bed sores or help them ambulate to improve post-surgery outcomes.) It can also mean not having the supplies that these patients need in order to have the best outcomes. Some examples are InterDry to prevent/treat skin fold infections or Hoyer lifts so that they can use a commode and avoid bedpans and chuck changes (both of which are made more difficult and dangerous for the patient and more likely to create negative outcomes when staff-to-patient ratios don’t allow for adequate care, even if the practitioners aren’t coming from a place of weight bias.)

All of this, in turn, can create practitioner bias when they blame higher-weight patients rather than the healthcare system that is leaving both patients and practitioners without what they need.   

When healthcare facilities are allowed to decide that they don’t want to spend the money to give higher-weight people the care they need, or they are not adequately funded to do so, then higher-weight patients suffer. Here again the negative impacts of this are often simply blamed on “obsity.” For example, research on post-operative complication rates will often suggest that “obsity” causes higher complication rates without exploring the ways that these size-based healthcare inequalities may actually be at the root of any elevated rate of complications.