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ActiveStills activist Keren Manor was shot by Israeli soldiers during an anti-Wall demonstration in the Palestinian village of Na'alin.

Keren Manor, a photographer with the ActiveStills Collective (www.activestills.org ), which documents the protests against building the separation wall in Na'alin, was injured last Thursday by a rubber coated steel bullet. The bullet was shot at a range of 10-15 meters by a Border Police officer who walked behind Manor, shot at her belt and from there moved to her thigh. Even though the law prohibits the use of rubber coated steel bullets at a distance of less than 50 meters, because of the inherent danger of injury, this has become common practice in dealing with demonstrations against the Wall in the territories. However, this is not the most shocking part of Manor’s story, which begins when she was taken to Ichilov Hospital.

Manor arrived with an open wound from which tissues and fat hung. The doctor at the reception refused to treat her due to the seriousness of the wound, and sent her to the emergency room. Ichilov’s emergency room was particularly busy that same afternoon, and Manor waited five hours with no treatment or exam. However, even though the doctors had ‘no time’ to check Manor, three of them had enough free time to begin political arguments with her.

“The first doctor entered and began to lecture me how the Wall defends us and what would we do without the Wall – as if to argue with me against what I am doing,” Manor said last week. “Another one said to me “What, that is from a rubber bullet? Two weeks ago I was in Ramallah and shot many rubber bullets and didn’t see such an impact,” while the third doctor said he is an officer in the reserves and began to lecture me how our army is moral while the other side is not.”

Apart from a decided lack of empathy, Manor was treated to a cursory examination and external cleaning of the wound by Dr. Davir Abraham, and was sent home. After one day she noticed there was no improvement in the open wound and returned to the emergency room. The doctors assumed that since Manor had already been treated there, that there was no need to carry out an x-ray, and they simply stitched the wound closed. However, after two days when the pain did not decrease, Manor went to her family doctor, who ordered an x-ray. The doctor discovered, to her amazement, that the bullet was still in her thigh. From here Manor returned to the emergency room, where the doctors conducted an operation under full sedation in order to open the wound, take out the bullet and close the area.

Ichilov Hospital: “The patient was examined by three different doctors in the emergency room, but was not sent for an x-ray as the doctors assumed, incorrectly it seems, that a rubber bullet cannot be viewed in an x-ray. The hospital will review the procedures for identifying foreign bodies accordingly. Out of respect for the patient, we will not respond to her contention that she was not treated due to her political opinions.”