Amid a diplomatic row between Jordan and Israel over the killing of a Jordanian judge, Israeli doctors last week saved the life of a seven-year-old Jordanian-Palestinian Arab boy.
The Israel Hayom daily reported on Sunday that the boy, who had suffered critical kidney failure, underwent a successful kidney transplant at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. His mother was the donor.
The complicated procedure was not available in Jordanian hospitals.
The boy's parents chose to have the operation at Rambam, issuing their request through Civil Administration Health Services Coordinator, Dalia Bessa, who expedited all the relevant authorizations, according to the newspaper.
The boy, who is currently hospitalized in the intensive care unit for children at Rambam, is recovering well, according to his doctors. Two days after the surgery, there were no signs of rejection of the new kidney, and he had a healthy appetite. His mother had visited him.
"We direct many patients from Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to Rambam and other hospitals as well," Bessa told Israel Hayom. "In the past year alone, I coordinated the arrival of 600 patients from the PA to Rambam."
Israeli doctors have more than once saved the lives of PA children, in some cases doing so as Gaza terrorists fired rocket barrages on southern Israel.
Even the one-year-old granddaughter of Hamas’s Gaza Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was brought to Israel in November to receive treatment for a serious infection of the digestive tract which affected her nervous system.
She was returned to Gaza a day later after Israeli doctors concluded they could not help her and later died.
The operation on the Jordanian boy is even more meaningful given the recent tension between Israel and Jordan and the PA. Last week, IDF soldiers shot and killed Raed Zeiter, a Palestinian-Jordanian judge, at the Allenby border crossing last Monday.
Zeiter was shot after he attacked a soldier and tried to grab his weapon. The shooting sparked the fury of both Jordan and the PA, with protesters in Amman demanding the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador and the abrogation of the two countries' 1994 peace treaty.
Prime Minister Abdullah Nsur has held Israel "completely responsible" for Zeiter's death and demanded an apology for the "hideous" killing.