Arab teachers and students working in Kfar Sava’s Meir Medical Center have been forbidden to speak to each other in Arabic, which is an official language in Israel. Haaretz learned that three Arab families whose children were hospitalized in the center filed a complaint with the hospital management.

The Education Ministry operates an education department in the Meir Medical Center, where hospitalized children between the ages of 3-17 partake in lessons and educational activities, if their medical condition permits it. The lessons are intended to at least partially make up for the children’s absence from school.

Three teachers are in charge of instructing the Jewish children and one teacher, sometimes assisted by a student, teaches the Arab kids, according to the Arab parents. The lessons to the Arab children are given in Arabic. But recently, the assistant teacher asked the Arab teacher, in Arabic, for an explanation about a children’s activity in the center. To everyone’s surprise the department’s supervisor ordered them to stop talking in their mother tongue.

“We don’t speak Arabic among the staff here, at the [Education] ministry’s instructions,” the supervisor said.