(AFP) – Nov 12, 2007

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel's high court on Monday rejected a petition from an Israeli human rights group for the state to change interrogation procedures for Gazans leaving the territory for medical care.

"The court said it did not have the mandate to discuss the mechanisms of the Shin Beth" internal security service, according to Miri Weingarten of the human rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel which lodged the petition.

The group had also asked that 11 patients refused permission to leave for security reasons be allowed out, a request to which the court gave the state seven days to respond.

"We are very disappointed indeed and afraid for the lives of those patients because they are in very bad condition," Weingarten said.

In the petition the rights group accused the Shin Beth of adopting new procedures in November lengthening the time it takes patients to cross from the increasingly isolated Gaza Strip into Israel.

The group said that since Israel declared Gaza a "hostile entity" on September 19 the number of patients considered a security risk had risen and the procedures at the Erez crossing grown longer.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, says the number of Gazans seeking medical care has doubled since last year, with 14,407 people seeking treatment from January to October 2007, compared to 7,166 over the same period in 2006.

"If there are security problems we have to check again and again because it's about Israeli lives," Shlomo Dror, the Israeli coordinator of activities for the occupied territories told AFP.

"The Palestinians have used the humanitarian channel for terror activities in the past."

Gaza has been cut off from all but vital humanitarian goods since the Islamist movement Hamas -- which Israel and the West consider a terror outfit -- took over in June after a week of bloody street battles with secular rivals.

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