Israel will pay with vaccines for Syria the release of a young Jewish woman who crossed the border

Benjamin Netanyahu pointed to a poster announcing four million vaccinations carried out in Israel in Jerusalem on Tuesday, DPA via Europa Press / Europa Press

The exchange made last Thursday of two Syrian prisoners for a young Jewish woman, who had entered Syrian territory of her own free will, concealed a secret clause.

The Government of Israel has promised to pay for the shipment of hundreds of thousands of vaccines against covid-19 to Syria, a country with which it has been technically at war for seven decades, in an agreement negotiated with the mediation of Russia.

The unusual pact between enemies, revealed on Sunday by the Arab newspaper published in London

, was denied by official media in Damascus and by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Despite the ban on its dissemination imposed by military censorship for reasons of national security, the Hebrew press aired it this Sunday as an open secret.

Vaccines have fully entered the geopolitical game.

As the nation most advanced in immunization, with more than a third of its population inoculated twice, Israel appears to have been forced to pay an extra premium for the ransom of its citizen.

She was a 25-year-old ultra-Orthodox, from a settlement of settlers in the West Bank and with a long history of penetration attempts behind the borders of the Gaza Strip and Jordan, according to the

newspaper

.

There he said he had friends and relationships thanks to his command of Arabic.

In view of her apparent emotional instability, social services have taken care of her upon her return to Israel via Moscow, after having crossed the Golan Heights, one of the most closely watched dividing lines in the world.

The Hebrew press estimates at least 1.2 million dollars (990,000 euros) the cost of sending to Syria about 500,000 doses of the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. “Not a dose of the Israeli vaccines has been used for this (the exchange of prisoners) ”, Netanyahu evaded before the questions of the press.

The Israeli health system has so far only used the Pfizer-BioNTech vials, although it has reserves from the Moderna laboratory and is waiting to receive from AstraZeneca.

"We brought the young woman back and I am not going to say anything else, at the express request of Russia," the prime minister added.

Syria's state news agency SANA was much more laconic in denying that the delivery of the vaccines was part of the deal.

After uncovering the content of the secret clause, bitter controversies have broken out in Israel.

The media have reacted with outrage at the resort to military censorship in a strictly humanitarian issue with little relevance to national security.

In the middle of the campaign for the legislative elections on March 23, the fourth in less than two years, the prime minister plays all the tricks favorable to his political interests and has acted with unusual swiftness in the case of the young Jewish woman - there are two Israeli captives in Gaza, a Jew of Ethiopian origin and a Bedouin, for more than five years - in an incident that touched the deepest chord of society.

The delivery of hundreds of thousands of vaccines to Syria while nearly five million Palestinians have received just a few thousand vials to start the immunization campaign in Gaza and the West Bank has also reached the Knesset (Parliament).

“I have requested for a long time that vaccines be transferred from Israeli reserves to the Palestinians,” deputy of the Joint List (coalition of Arab parties) Ahmed Tibi cried on Twitter.

“Do I have to wait for a Jewish person to cross to the Gaza Strip?

We are all in the same epidemiological zone! ”, Emphasized this parliamentarian, a doctor by profession.

The vaccine gap between rich and poor has now emerged more strongly in the Middle East than the conflict that has long faced neighboring countries.