Boulder group raises $75,000 for first-ever ambulance in West Bank refugee camp
BOULDER, Colo. — At Askar refugee camp in the West Bank, a staff of paramedics are counting down the days until they can start using their community’s first dedicated ambulance.
For the past month, the brand new $95,000 ambulance has been sitting stationary some 65 miles away in Haifa, Israel’s largest seaport. The ambulance, purchased by a group of Boulderites, is awaiting final inspections.
The byzantine process at the port involves various approvals, signatures, inspections (of both the vehicle and medical equipment), port fees, taxes — and lots of waiting.
“Our colleague from Askar, he says he calls every day, and he’s really getting frustrated with whatever the holdup is,” said Essrea Cherin, co-founder of the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project (BNSCP), the nonprofit she started in 2011 that raised the funds to purchase the vehicle.
“We just heard over and over and over again from everyone how Askar needs an ambulance so badly,” Cherin said.
Over the past decade, violence has been escalating in the West Bank between Israeli settlers, which currently number about 500,000, and Palestinians. Jewish settlers have been rampaging Palestinian villages and Palestinians have been carrying out street attacks on Israelis.
Since October 7, Israel has held the West Bank under a tight grip, restricting movement and carrying out frequent raids on armed militants and terror suspects. Israelis have killed 502 Palestinians in the area since the Israel-Hamas war began.
When Israeli forces occupy Nablus, they sometimes shut down the main road, severing the city in half, said Cherin, who has been visiting Nablus for the past several years.
Ambulances from the west side, where the hospitals are located, are not able to access the Askar camp on the east side of the city, where about 24,000 registered Palestinians live.
“All too often the [residents] are forced to transport people who are injured or ailing in a private vehicle,” Cherin, said. “Those private vehicles often don't have medical staff or medical equipment. And the occupying military will often not let them through. So the people just die on their way to the hospital."
Ambulances, Cherin said, have a better chance of passing through Israeli blockades than private vehicles.
“They can at least tend to the needs of the patient while they're attempting to get across to the hospital,” Cherin said.
Once it arrives at Askar, the ambulance will have trained staff and medical equipment on board and ICU-capabilities.
The Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project (BNSCP) currently has 50 active members. The group started raising funds in 2023 to purchase the ambulance, thinking it would take three years to raise the $75,000.
Instead, it took just nine months and was the most amount of money the organization had ever raised.
The vehicle is a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van that was built in a factory in Ankarra, Turkey that specializes in building and maintaining ambulances.
BNSCP held a number of fundraising efforts, including a Zoom dinner with members of Askar camp.
A walk to raise money took place in Boulder, coincidentally, on October 7, the day Hamas militants attacked Israel, killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostage. By May, the UN reported that Israel’s retaliation in Gaza had killedmore than 35,000 Palestiniansand that, of that figure, officials had been able to identify 70% by age and gender.
“It was quite stunning and shocking to be gathering on that day,” Cherin said.
Cherin said that after the Israel-Hamas war began, the project received a surge in donations.
“People started finding us and seeing that there was something concrete that they could contribute to,” she said.
Nablus is one of ten sister cities that Boulder has partnered with over the past 40 years to foster international cultural and educational exchanges. Other Boulder sister cities include Lhasa, Tibet; Yamagata, Japan; and Yateras, Cuba. Each sister city project operates as its own nonprofit – with little to no engagement or funding from Boulder itself.
The delegation’s trip to Nablus in October 2022 spurred the decision to buy an ambulance.
In late April, Cherin and another member of the BNSCP Board — Burke Enssle and his son, Jonathan — visited the ambulance factory in Ankarra, Turkey, just before it was shipped off to Haifa.
“At first I was like, ‘why would we spend thousands of dollars to travel there when we could just put that [money] towards good work?’” Cherin said. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized we really should show up. Palestinian culture is a little bit more formal. My contacts in Nablus have been saying for months that someone from Boulder really needs to be there when the ambulance was presented.”
Afterward, Cherin, Enssle and Jonathan traveled to the Askar refugee camp and other cities in the West Bank.
“There's a profound heaviness that pervades throughout pretty much everybody that we encountered, whether it was in Nablus, Ramallah, or Bethlehem. They haven't left their communities in seven months,” Cherin said. “It’s just not safe. It’s so dangerous.”
Following the October 7 attacks, Israel has added more checkpoints in the West Bank that the military opens and closes at will – which can lead to hours-long lines of traffic. Cherin said if the Israeli military suspects a Palestinian at a checkpoint, they download their phone data and scour their social media posts.
“People that I talked to, if they had a meeting in Ramallah and they live in Nablus, they would spend hours the night before deleting every single incriminating thing off of their phone,” she said.
Cherin said people begin to self-restrict. “You live your life as small as possible,” she said.
While in Nablus, Cherin met with eight staff who live at the refugee camp who will be volunteering on the Askar Ambulance on their days off.
The ambulance driver, who works six days a month in the city of Nablus, will volunteer the rest of each month with the project. Cherin said he has arranged for colleagues to backfill him on the six days he’s working each month.
The ambulance will charge a sliding scale — free for those who can’t afford the service and fees for those who can.
“As we were raising money to purchase the ambulance, I heard concerns raised from a number of people [at BNSCP] about the sustainability of the project: How are they going to staff it? How are they going to afford to keep it stocked?” Cherin said.
“And I was really struck hard that they have the exact same thoughts and concerns, and they had thought it through very thoroughly. So that was very reassuring for me.”
How the Askar Camp came to be
In 1947, the UN passed a resolution partitioning Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab world rejected the plan, arguing it was unfair. The Arab-Israeli war broke out with Jewish militias attacking Palestinian villages and Arab groups attacking Jewish settlements, cities and armed forces.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their land during this time, under what Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” in Arabic.
In 1950, the UN created a series of refugee camps for displaced Palestinians where, 75 years later, many continue to live. The Askar refugee camp, which was formed in 1950, is one of these, and is one of19 refugee camps in the West Bank.
Today, these long-standing camps have evolved from tent cities into rows of concrete blockhouses. As new generations have been born, the camps have grown vertically to accommodate the population.
The population within Askar is poorer and more overcrowded than the population living outside the camp.
“Refugees are at the bottom of the social ladder,” said Cherin.
Prior to October 7, about 150,000 Palestinians from the West Bank worked in Israel. Since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, many have lost their main source of income and unemployment has skyrocketed, as have food prices.
“Life in the West Bank as well as Israel for Palestinians has gotten significantly worse since October, orders of magnitude worse,” said Cherin. “The needs are just ballooning.”
Once the ambulance is off and running, the next project the BNSCP will work on is adding another medical clinic to the camp. The current clinic, operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) closes each day at 2pm and lacks an X-ray machine, ultrasound machine and dental clinic.
The U.S. temporarily barred funding for UNRWA earlier this year after Israel claimed 12 staffers had participated in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The UN terminated those individuals and is currently investigating 14 UNRWA staffers.
Despite the delays in getting the ambulance, in some ways, the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project was lucky. On May 2, just a few days after the ambulance arrived at the port of Haifa, Turkey announced a boycott against all trade with Israel. While Turkish officials said they would coordinate to ensure Palestinians would not be affected, it would have likely added greater hurdles to arriving.
“God loves us,” said Hatem al Hafi, one of the members of Askar refugee camp’s leadership who works closely with the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project.
“We are lucky that it arrived at the port.”
Andrea Kramar is an investigative multimedia journalist at Rocky Mountain PBS. Andreakramar@rmpbs.org