On Sunday, Yehoshua Shani, the uncle of an IDF soldier who had been medically evacuated from Lebanon to Rambam Hospital last week, claimed that Arab staff had purposely mistreated his nephew. According to Shani, “all the nursing staff on duty spoke Arabic. At one point, all the families were taken out of the ward and the doors were locked. The situation needs to be understood: four seriously injured IDF soldiers, who had just returned from fighting in Lebanon, are left alone behind locked doors, without their families, while the entire staff on duty speaks Arabic.” 

He claimed that his nephew was maliciously denied water and “when the staff turned him over in bed, they did so brutally, ‘like a sardine,’ and his head was slammed into the bed.” This was portrayed, not as mere impatience or carelessness, but deliberate malpractice. The uncle asked why an IDF soldier was not stationed to protect his nephew, and demanded that the IDF and the hospital open an investigation into the incident. “Not every Arab staff member is responsible for the incident,” Shani was sure to add, “but we also cannot ignore the concerns of the family members” of the wounded soldiers. 

As explained by a Channel 12 news commentator, the reality of the event was clear: the soldiers were in an intensive care unit that didn’t allow for round-the-clock visitors. The nurses had other patients to attend to, and couldn’t be of constant service to the soldiers. What should have been dismissed as an Israeli “Karen” moment, where a family member believes his relatives deserve special treatment at a public hospital and is enraged when they........

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