A baby will get off a bus close to the Jordanian border with different pediatric sufferers who’ve been evacuated from Gaza via Israel on June 11.
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Salah Malkawi/Getty Pictures
AMMAN, Jordan — The King Hussein Most cancers Heart is big 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 situations 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, looking for 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 struggle between Israel and Hamas began in October 2023 and shut down all the faculties.
Final 12 months, 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 residence 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 docs have been going to have the ability to end the surgical procedure, you do not know if there’s medication obtainable, you do not know if he was going to die throughout the surgical procedure, or if we have 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 somewhat than civilian infrastructure.
In January, the medical help group Docs With out Borders mentioned Israeli assaults had killed 1,000 well being care employees, a determine Gaza’s Well being Ministry says has now grown to greater than 1,400. Attributable to an Israeli blockade on meals and medication, hospitals which can be 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 Might 13, 2025.
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Ali Jadallah/Anadolu by way of Getty Pictures
UNICEF says greater than 50,000 youngsters in Gaza have been killed or injured throughout the struggle, which started after the militant group Hamas launched a cross-border assault into Israel. Gaza’s Well being Ministry says greater than 55,000 individuals, lots of them ladies and kids, have died. Israel says almost 1,200 Israelis and foreigners have been killed within the preliminary Oct. 7, 2023, assault.
Israel this spring intensified its assaults and help companies mentioned in March that greater than 12,000 individuals require pressing medical evacuation out of Gaza, together with at the least 4,500 youngsters.
In February, President Trump recommended 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 have been already displaced from their properties 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 youngsters
King Abdullah instructed Trump that Jordan was ready to deliver 2,000 youngster most cancers sufferers and different extraordinarily sick youngsters to Jordan for remedy as rapidly as doable.
However nearly 4 months later, only some dozen sufferers have arrived.
Younger sufferers from Gaza close to the King Hussein (Allenby) Bridge on Might 14, after being evacuated by the Jordanian army for medical remedy in Jordan. Jordan’s King Abdullah promised President Trump in February to herald 2,000 youngsters from Gaza for life-saving remedy.
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“There have been difficulties imposed by the Israeli authorities which can be stopping the best way of constructing 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 situation: Physicians for Human Rights in Israel has taken the Israeli authorities to courtroom to attempt to power them to permit extra sufferers out.
The Israeli army 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 among the sickest youngsters, who elsewhere would obtain instant remedy.
“What we’re seeing is admittedly explicit to Gaza sufferers — they’re extra superior illnesses,” says the King Hussein Most cancers Heart 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 laborious 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 among the tumors have grown so giant they’ve broken the youngsters’s organs, leaving them in excruciating ache. With Israel’s strict controls on meals and medication getting into Gaza, most of the sufferers are malnourished.
“These sufferers require intensive care unit help, they require respiratory help they usually require plenty of dietary help as properly,” she says. “It makes the tumor very tough to deal with.”
Despite the fact that most childhood cancers are treatable, Rihani says, not the entire youngsters 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 discipline hospitals in Gaza and was the main hall for help going to the territory by truck and air earlier than Israel blocked help shipments in March.
The Royal Jordanian Air Drive’s eighth Squadron unloads humanitarian help 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 Heart is likely 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 number 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 struggle have been despatched again to Gaza. Jordan has been criticized although for sending individuals again throughout the persevering with battle it says have absolutely accomplished remedy for different diseases.
“We’re bringing them by batches,” says Momani, the communications minister. “We’ll take these youngsters 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 manner 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 international locations are among the many very fortunate few.
Zainab al-Astal arrived in Jordan along with her sons Qassim, 15, and Ahmed, 13, in mid-Might. 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 needs to take a seat within the restaurant all day and simply hold consuming,” she says.
The day they have 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 complicated, in response to sufferers and the World Well being Group. Gaza civil protection authorities say at the least 28 individuals, together with sufferers, have been killed within the airstrikes.
Israel mentioned it was concentrating on a Hamas command and management heart beneath the hospital. Israel launched footage displaying what it mentioned have been tunnels beneath the hospital complicated 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 by way of 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 communicate very matter-of-factly concerning the bombings.
Leen al-Dabbas, a medical psychologist on the most cancers heart, says most of the youngsters are affected by “masked despair” — not but capable of course of what they have been via.
“Once they first arrive they’re in an adjustment interval,” she says.
For a lot of households the concern for their very own lives has been changed by relentless fear over family members they left behind in Gaza.
One lady, Suhair Zouroub, 13, sits along with her mom Shayma’ and youthful brother, a blue hospital bracelet on her skinny wrist, forward of her first rounds of chemotherapy.
She was identified two months in the past with leukemia. When she suffered seizures in Gaza, there was no remedy obtainable. She describes huddling along with the entire household, hugging one another throughout the airstrikes. Her 2-1/2-year-old brother, Jude, pipes up with the phrase tiyara, Arabic for “aircraft.”
The eighth-grader had a 98% grade level common and says she needs to be a world lawyer.
“It is very good right here,” she says in a quiet voice. “However Gaza is extra lovely. Nothing can ever be like residence.”
