A toddler will get off a bus close to the Jordanian border with different pediatric sufferers who’ve been evacuated from Gaza by way of Israel on June 11.
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Salah Malkawi/Getty Pictures
AMMAN, Jordan — The King Hussein Most cancers Middle is large and gleaming, with metal beams and floor-to-ceiling home windows. Cozy cafes and stocked snack machines dot the air-conditioned foyer. It is a stark distinction to circumstances in Gaza, from the place dozens of its newest sufferers have come.
“We could not discover meals and wherever we went there have been airstrikes,” says Safa Salha, who spent months going from broken hospital to broken hospital, in search of remedy for her 16-year-old son Youssef.
Youssef, a tall, quiet teenager who lets his mom do many of the speaking, was in tenth grade earlier than the warfare between Israel and Hamas began in October 2023 and shut down all the colleges.
Final yr, he was operated on in Gaza for a mind tumor urgent down on his optic nerve. His mom says the hospital was unable to do MRI scans earlier than the surgical procedure and could not conduct a biopsy. Surgeons eliminated as a lot of the tumor as they may and despatched him house two days later as a result of they wanted the mattress, his mom says.
“The toughest factor was the choice to do the surgical procedure,” says Salha, a trainer and college actions organizer. “You do not know if the medical doctors had been going to have the ability to end the surgical procedure, you do not know if there’s drugs obtainable, you do not know if he was going to die throughout the surgical procedure, or if we had been going to die whereas he was there.”
Gaza well being care in ruins
All of Gaza’s hospitals have been both broken or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes. Israel says it has focused Hamas websites moderately than civilian infrastructure.
In January, the medical assist group Medical doctors With out Borders mentioned Israeli assaults had killed 1,000 well being care staff, a determine Gaza’s Well being Ministry says has now grown to greater than 1,400. As a result of an Israeli blockade on meals and drugs, hospitals which are partially opening accomplish that with extreme shortages of medication, anesthesia and primary provides.
An inside view of the destroyed European Hospital after Israeli military assault hit the hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza on Could 13, 2025.
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Ali Jadallah/Anadolu through Getty Pictures
UNICEF says greater than 50,000 kids in Gaza have been killed or injured throughout the warfare, which started after the militant group Hamas launched a cross-border assault into Israel. Gaza’s Well being Ministry says greater than 55,000 folks, a lot of them ladies and kids, have died. Israel says almost 1,200 Israelis and foreigners had been killed within the preliminary Oct. 7, 2023, assault.
Israel this spring intensified its assaults and assist businesses mentioned in March that greater than 12,000 folks require pressing medical evacuation out of Gaza, together with at the least 4,500 kids.
In February, President Trump instructed a plan to take over Gaza, displacing Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt whereas turning the enclave right into a U.S.-controlled zone that includes beach-front property. Many Palestinians in Gaza had been already displaced from their houses after the creation of Israel in 1948.
The relocation plan is seen by Jordan as an existential risk to the small kingdom, a loss of life knell for hopes of an eventual Palestinian state and tantamount to complicity in ethnic cleaning of Gaza.
The king pledges to assist 2,000 sick kids
King Abdullah advised Trump that Jordan was ready to convey 2,000 youngster most cancers sufferers and different extraordinarily sick kids to Jordan for remedy as shortly as attainable.
However virtually 4 months later, just a few dozen sufferers have arrived.
Younger sufferers from Gaza close to the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge on Could 14, after being evacuated by the Jordanian navy for medical remedy in Jordan. Jordan’s King Abdullah promised President Trump in February to usher in 2,000 kids from Gaza for life-saving remedy.
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“There have been difficulties imposed by the Israeli authorities which are stopping the way in which of creating this occur easily,” mentioned Mohammad al-Momani, Jordan’s authorities communication minister.
Jordanian officers say Israel, which controls the Gaza border, has obstructed exit visas wanted for medical evacuations for some sufferers and guardians wanted to journey with them. It is a long-standing problem: Physicians for Human Rights in Israel has taken the Israeli authorities to court docket to attempt to power them to permit extra sufferers out.
The Israeli navy didn’t reply to NPR queries about obstructing exit visas. The United Nations’ World Well being Group, which works with Israeli authorities and oversees logistics for medical evacuations, deferred remark to Israel.
Lethal delays
Well being officers say delays in evacuations have meant diminished possibilities of survival for a few of the sickest kids, who elsewhere would obtain rapid remedy.
“What we’re seeing is actually explicit to Gaza sufferers — they’re extra superior illnesses,” says the King Hussein Most cancers Middle chief of pediatrics Rawad Rihani. “Circumstances the place the tumor may be very superior with the dearth of correct remedy and correct analysis, or correct analysis, which makes them very onerous to deal with.”
Pediatric sufferers evacuated from Gaza arrive for remedy at King Hussein Medical Metropolis in Amman on June 11.
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Salah Malkawi/Getty Pictures
Rihani says a few of the tumors have grown so massive they’ve broken the kids’s organs, leaving them in excruciating ache. With Israel’s strict controls on meals and drugs coming into Gaza, lots of the sufferers are malnourished.
“These sufferers require intensive care unit assist, they require respiratory assist they usually require plenty of dietary assist as nicely,” she says. “It makes the tumor very troublesome to deal with.”
Regardless that most childhood cancers are treatable, Rihani says, not all the kids evacuated to Jordan survive.
“A few of them are very superior and went to palliative care,” Rihani says. “Sadly we aren’t capable of save everybody.”
Jordan additionally operates two area hospitals in Gaza and was the key hall for assist going to the territory by truck and air earlier than Israel blocked assist shipments in March.
The Royal Jordanian Air Drive’s eighth Squadron unloads humanitarian assist at a helipad on the outskirts of Gaza, on Feb. 9.
Diego Ibarra Sánchez for Npr
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Diego Ibarra Sánchez for Npr
The King Hussein Most cancers Middle is without doubt one of the area’s main most cancers hospitals. Rihani says it has 44 pediatric most cancers beds and 24 beds for pediatric bone marrow transplants, which might be supplemented by different hospitals that additionally deal with most cancers. A few of the arrivals require solely out-patient remedy.
Rihani says no most cancers sufferers handled in Jordan for the reason that begin of the Gaza warfare have been despatched again to Gaza. Jordan has been criticized although for sending folks again throughout the persevering with battle it says have absolutely accomplished remedy for different sicknesses.
“We’re bringing them by batches,” says Momani, the communications minister. “We’ll take these kids to deal with them however then after they end their remedy they need to be going again to their homeland. We do not need to be in any method serving to the displacement of Palestinians.”
Starvation stalking Gaza
With so many obstacles, sufferers and their households who’ve been evacuated to Jordan and different nations are among the many very fortunate few.
Zainab al-Astal arrived in Jordan together with her sons Qassim, 15, and Ahmed, 13, in mid-Could. Each the boys have lymphoma.
Displaced repeatedly by Israeli airstrikes, there was hardly any meals, not even bread. Right here, Astal says Ahmed has been dazzled by the abundance of shawarma — a sandwich of sliced rooster roasted on a spit.
“He says he desires to take a seat within the restaurant all day and simply preserve consuming,” she says.
The day they had been evacuated from Gaza, the Astals had gathered with different sufferers and guardians close to a bus on the Gaza European Hospital to drive to the border when Israel bombed the advanced, in accordance with sufferers and the World Well being Group. Gaza civil protection authorities say at the least 28 folks, together with sufferers, had been killed within the airstrikes.
Israel mentioned it was concentrating on a Hamas command and management heart underneath the hospital. Israel launched footage displaying what it mentioned had been tunnels underneath the hospital advanced to bolster its declare, however the closely edited video couldn’t be independently confirmed.
Sufferers are being evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis to be transferred to Nasser Hospital, two of the few well being facilities working within the Gaza Strip, on July 2, 2024.
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Abed Rahim Khatib/image alliance through Getty Pictures
“I knew it was going to land close to us however I could not transfer,” says Astal. She says the impression threw the boys within the air and rained down a lot particles she could not see for 10 minutes.
Strangers threw themselves on the bottom over the boys to guard them, she says.
The youngsters themselves converse very matter-of-factly in regards to the bombings.
Leen al-Dabbas, a medical psychologist on the most cancers heart, says lots of the kids are affected by “masked melancholy” — not but capable of course of what they have been by way of.
“Once they first arrive they’re in an adjustment interval,” she says.
For a lot of households the worry for their very own lives has been changed by relentless fear over family members they left behind in Gaza.
One woman, Suhair Zouroub, 13, sits together with her mom Shayma’ and youthful brother, a blue hospital bracelet on her skinny wrist, forward of her first rounds of chemotherapy.
She was recognized two months in the past with leukemia. When she suffered seizures in Gaza, there was no remedy obtainable. She describes huddling along with all the household, hugging one another throughout the airstrikes. Her 2-1/2-year-old brother, Jude, pipes up with the phrase tiaaraArabic for “airplane.”
The eighth-grader had a 98% grade level common and says she desires to be a global lawyer.
“It’s totally good right here,” she says in a quiet voice. “However Gaza is extra lovely. Nothing can ever be like house.”
