Israel has informed the United Nations that it is ready to offer medical aid to victims of the strife in Rwanda.
This assistance would be in addition to the food and medicine Israel has already sent.
For some months now, Israel has been discussing with U.N. officials the possibility of sending a mobile medical unit to assist U.N. efforts in Africa. This is part of Israel’s attempts to integrate itself fully within United Nations activities, following the decline of anti-Israel rhetoric at the world body.
The U.N. currently has no presence in Rwanda, but is being urged to establish one.
Israel’s proposal is not an isolated effort to provide relief to the Rwandan refugees.
Abie Nathan, the prominent Israeli peace activist and humanitarian who built refugee camps in Ethiopia in 1984 and in Somalia in 1992, is now focusing his attention on the plight of Rwandan refugees trapped on the Tanzanian border.
Nathan, who recently visited the Tanzania-Rwanda border to calculate the best way to assist the refugees, wrote in a fund-raising letter, “In spite of all of my experience, I can honestly say I have never seen anything like what I saw on the border of Tanzania.”
Though plans are still in their early stages, Nathan hopes to establish a tent city that would provide 20,000 of the over 450,000 refugees with food, shelter and medical care.
While these endeavors are being organized, the Jewish community in Johannesburg is playing a key role in the first airlift of food and clothing to war-torn Rwanda through “Operation Mercy,” launched by religious leaders and the Department of Foreign Affairs in South Africa.
Isaac Reznik, executive director of the Union of Orthodox Synagogues, flew this week with the South African delegation to Rwanda. He said the town of Mwanza, on Lake Victoria, had been earmarked as a possible landing strip for emergency supplies from Johannesburg.
“The response from the Jewish community has been excellent,” said Reznik, a member of the Operation Mercy committee. “Appeals were made by rabbis from their pulpits and, as always, the Jewish people opened their hearts.”
(Contributing to this report were Larry Yudelson at the United Nations and Suzanne Belling in Johannesburg.)
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