Israel and Egypt have agreed on Thursday to allow at least 19 sick children, most of them with cancer, to leave Gaza for treatment, Israeli and Palestinian officials announced, marking the first large-scale evacuation of seriously ill Gazans since the Rafah border crossing was closed in early May.
The Israeli army said the operation was carried out in coordination with the United States, Egypt and the international community. A total of 68 people, including sick and wounded personnel and their guards, were allowed to leave, the army said.
More than 10,000 sick and injured people in Gaza need emergency medical treatment that can only be found outside the strip, the World Health Organization says. Said They include people injured in airstrikes this week, cancer patients, children with life-threatening illnesses and elderly people in need of open-heart surgery.
Even before the war, many Gaza residents were forced to travel abroad for life-saving treatments, such as chemotherapy, which were virtually nonexistent in the Strip, where the health sector has struggled for more than 15 years under a crippling Israeli and Egyptian blockade aimed at containing Hamas.
But the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the main route by which Gazans can escape, was closed after Israeli forces seized the border in a military offensive in May. Egypt closed its side of the crossing in protest, according to the Israeli army, and the Gaza Strip was subsequently burned down in a fire, seemingly dashing any hopes that the crossing would reopen in the near future.
At least two sick Gazans who were due to be evacuated in early May have died, their families said.
With the Rafah border crossing closed, the group of children evacuated on Thursday was transferred through another border crossing, Kerem Shalom, into Israeli territory and then to Egypt. The move did not immediately appear to signal a new, permanent route for seriously ill people to safely leave Gaza.
One of the children who crossed the border on Thursday was a 10-month-old girl named Sadir Hamdan.
For months, his family watched in anxiety as his condition deteriorated – his stomach swelled like a balloon due to severe liver failure and he desperately needed a transplant, his father, Tamer Hamdan, said.
On Thursday morning, after weeks of waiting, Hamdan and Sadir were finally allowed to leave the exclave. After entering Israel, they were taken by ferry with other patients to the Israeli village of Nitzana, from where they crossed into Egyptian territory, he said.
“Thank God,” Hamdan said by phone as he sat on a bus on the Egyptian side of the checkpoint. “I’m very happy we were able to get Sadir out safely. Now we just need to finish her treatment.”
Their departure from Gaza was bittersweet, however.
Hamdan travelled with his daughter to be a partial liver donor, but his wife and three other children were not allowed to accompany him, and he said he feared for their fate in Gaza.
“We’re all heading into the unknown,” he said.