Is Israel relenting because of the challenge from medical groups?
The Gaza Strip’s medical crisis under Israel’s recent offensive: a case study of Dr. Al-Masri in Gaza
She said Israeli restrictions on volunteer medical missions since its Rafah offensive have severely limited the number and effectiveness of medical expertise going into Gaza, where most hospitals have been destroyed or heavily damaged and local medical personnel have been killed, wounded or repeatedly displaced.
Townson Cocke, the medical advocacy coordinator for Rebuilding Alliance, said the 19-person volunteer mission sponsored by the Palestinian American Medical Association in May brought in 300 suitcases, most filled with medical supplies and said that all of them were carefully screened by Israel. Doctors said the supplies were used up in days.
Elaydi said the current team had to cancel an operating day due to lack of supplies. “My own cousin who needed an amputation was refusing care because they wanted to do it without anesthesia.”
“With the evolution of a lot of very small portable pieces of machinery like oxygen monitors and portable ECG machines and portable ultrasound, a lot of the teams were bringing these things in by hand because other routes are unreliable,” said Abu Sittah, the U.K. Palestinian surgeon. He will not be allowed to return to Gaza to treat patients under Israel’s new rules.
Even before the war, many Gazans were forced to travel abroad for lifesaving treatments, like chemotherapy, which were almost nonexistent in the Gaza Strip. The enclave’s health sector has struggled for over 15 years under a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade intended to contain Hamas.
The European hospital in Rafah is more difficult to treat patients due to the situation, said Dr. Al-Masri.
Al-Masri graduated from medical school just last year. But with most of the hospital staff displaced, on Monday evening the young doctor was one of the few physicians in the emergency room when wounded patients were brought in from an airstrike. The medical staff ran out of kits to perform blood tests.
Al-Masri resuscitated the child, who was between the ages of 5 to 6 years old, and he was still alive on Tuesday. The rest of the family were also hurt.
The First Major Evacuation of Critically Ill and Sick Children in Gaza since the Rafah Border Crossing Closed in May
“Everything was going fine. And then finally the news came out that they will not allow doctors or health-care workers with Palestinian origins to enter,” Al-Hinti said.
Al-Hinti is Jordanian and has Palestinian parents. The only neurologist, a fluent Arabic speaker, and a woman, she was invaluable to the hospital. Despite the heartbreaking conditions in Rafah, she signed up for another mission with the Palestinian American Medical Association.
Dr. Ali Elaydi, an orthopedic surgeon, was among the volunteers in April at the European Gaza Hospital. He said he was able to do more than 20 surgeries, helped by medical supplies he and the rest of the team brought in. He signed up for another mission recently.
Israel and Egypt agreed to allow at least 19 sick children, most of them cancer patients, to leave Gaza for medical treatment on Thursday, Israeli and Palestinian officials said, in the first major evacuation of critically ill Gazans since the Rafah border crossing shut down in early May.
One of the NGOs involved in arranging for the evacuees said that Israeli officials told them that they had not been evacuated yet.
“Since May 7, the Rafah crossing was closed and no patients could go out,” said Adi Lustigman, an attorney with the human rights group. “We submitted the petition asking for immediate intervention to let the children and other patients, not only children, go out to get medical care.”
The case will be heard by Israel’s Supreme Court next week. Lustigman said the group had chosen to argue against the baby girl being a security threat.
The aid organization funding the transplant, Children Not Numbers, said Wednesday that Sadeel had been given clearance by Israeli authorities for evacuation but had not yet been able to leave with her parents. One of the parents is the planned organ donor.
Israel’s restricted evacuations after the Gaza war: Why Israel needs a humanitarian crisis? Israeli military response to Hamas and World Health Organization
Lustigman said that Israel has many reasons to justify everything, including the fact that there is a security issue in our area. You can’t justify just ignoring human disasters that are happening with this argument.
The California-based aid group, Rebuilding Alliance, is lobbying Congress to pressure Israel to create a stream of medical evacuates and lift restrictions on medical aid missions.
After the war in Gaza began with the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack against Israel, Nisreen Malley, the group’s advocacy manager, said it was White House intervention that persuaded Israel to allow child cancer patients to leave for treatment and that pressure is needed again.
“This is barely cosmetic,” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a prominent Palestinian British surgeon, of Israel’s limited resumption of medical evacuations.
The Israeli military said the operation had been carried out in coordination with the United States, Egypt and the international community. In total, 68 people — sick and injured patients and their escorts — were allowed to leave, the military said.
Over 10,000 sick and wounded people in Gaza require urgent care that is available only outside the enclave, the World Health Organization said this week. They include those wounded in airstrikes, as well as cancer patients, children with life-threatening illnesses and older people who need open-heart surgery.
But the main conduit through which Gazans could leave — the Rafah crossing with Egypt — shut down after Israeli forces captured the border in May during a military offensive. Egypt shuttered its side of the gateway in protest, and the Gazan part was later destroyed in a fire, according to the Israeli military, seemingly dashing hopes that it would be reopened in the near future.
A Palestinian doctor in Gaza Strip has said that Israel’s restrictions on volunteer medical missions since its offensive have severely limited the number of medical expertise going into the Strip. Dr Ali al-Masri, who has treated over 100 patients in Gaza, said that most hospitals have been destroyed or heavily damaged and local medical personnel have been killed or repeatedly displaced.