The Israel Prison Services will not pay for a cosmetic nose job for terrorist Asra Jabas, who was seriously injured while carrying out an attack in October 2015, IPS announced Tuesday.
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Last month, reports reveals that IPS – which had already covered the costs of two surgeries for Jabas that were deemed medically necessary – was considering paying for her to undergo reconstructive rhinoplasty, a procedure classified as elective.
However, when the public learned that the authorities were weighing the possibility of paying for Jabas' nose job, outrage ensued, particularly among the relatives of police offers Moshe Chen, who was seriously wounded in the attack.
On Oct. 11, 2015, Jabas took a gas canister and drove toward Jerusalem, planning to attack Jews. Police from the Maaleh Adumim station noticed something suspicious about her car, which Jabas had been driving in a lane reserved for public transportation, and pulled her over.
Jabas proceeded to shout "Allahu Akhbar" and blew up the gas canister. She sustained serious injuries, and Chen, who had stopped her, was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Medical Center with burns on his face and chest. Jabas was taken to Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center.
Following the reports, Chen wrote to head of the IPS Katy Perry and to Public Security Minister Omer Barlev, asking that they put an end to any plans to pay for Jabas' nose job.
"It cannot be that the life of a police officer and his family are destroyed, and the terrorist is awarded hundreds of thousands of shekels of taxpayers' money," Chen wrote.
Shay Glick, director general of the Betsalmo advocacy organization, which is representing Chen, said, "Moshe prevented a disaster, and is still wounded because of it. It is unacceptable that public money will go to a terrorist who tried to murder Jews. A terrorist has to know that they're not at the Hilton, but in prison – and suffer. We demand that Minister Barlev make a public promise that the Israeli government won't fund the surgery."
IPS issued a statement refuting the reports that it had planned to pay for Jabas' nose job. "Despite various reports, IPS' response to the appeal to the petition did not include any new willingness about the surgeries the prisoner wanted to have performed.
"An opinion submitted in the prisoner's case raised another option for treatment. Because of that, and because IPS is committed to reviewing every request submitted by a prisoner, she was informed her request would be evaluated – nothing more," and IPS statement read.
In a related development, MK Michal Waldiger (Religious Zionist Party) has presented a law that would ban state-funded cosmetic procedures for terrorists to the Knesset. The law would revoke terrorist prisoners' entitlement to elective treatments and treatments that are not included in the "basket" of government-funded health services.
Waldiger says that the IPS' policies on security prisoners "is unreasonably soft, compared to that of many other countries."
The MK said that a team of experts convened in 2009 to examine the conditions in which security prisoners are held in Israel in light of Israeli and international law found that security prisoners in Israel enjoy conditions and privileges unequalled elsewhere in the world, and far beyond what the law mandates they receive.
"This bill is not intended to violate the basic rights of patients that appear in the law on patients' rights and international charters to which Israel is a signatory," the bill reads.
"In exceptional cases, the public security minister may, after consulting the defense minister, have the authority to allow a security prisoner to benefit from the privileges outlined above, for special reasons," the bill adds.
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