Palestinian medical supplies remain banned in the new Gaza crossing with Israel, according to a Gazan medical worker who served at the Hamad Medical Mission
The missions recently started up again with Israel allowing much smaller teams to move through its Kerem Shalom crossing with southern Gaza. The medical aid workers of Palestinian origin were banned, according to doctors.
The 19-person volunteer mission sponsored by the Palestinian American Medical Association brought in 300 suitcases, filled with medical supplies, but all of them were carefully screened by Israel, said Townson Cocke, the medical advocacy leader for the Rebuilding Alliance. Doctors said the supplies were used up in days.
Elaydi knew that the current team had to cancel an operating day because of the 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 would most likely not be permitted to return to Gaza to treat patients.
The requirements of the new Israeli rules make it more difficult for doctors to help out in Gaza. The numbers of doctors and nurses going in have dropped dramatically, according to the nonprofit group Rebuilding Alliance and medical personnel who have gone in previously.
It has made treating patients even more difficult at the European hospital in Rafah, said Dr. Alaa Al-Masri, a Gaza physician who said he had learned how to diagnose Parkinson’s and other diseases from Al-Hinti while she was there.
Al-Masri attended medical school. 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. Medical staff ran out of kits for blood tests in the morning, which made it very difficult for them.
Al-Masri said he resuscitated the child, who was 5 or 6 years old, and said he was still alive on Tuesday. The rest of his family had also been injured.
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“Less than 48 hours before my supposed entry into Gaza, I was informed by the World Health Organization that I was rejected. He said that he had already traveled to Jordan.
Al-Hinti is Jordanian American, with Palestinian parents. She was the only doctor at the hospital and she was proficient in Arabic and neurology. 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 that he and the rest of the team brought in some medical supplies that helped him do more than 20 surgeries. He signed up for another mission recently.
Israeli and Palestinian officials said that Israel and Egypt will allow at least 19 sick children, most of them cancer patients, to leave Gaza for treatment on Thursday.
On Wednesday, a group involved in trying to arrange for the groups to be evacuated said that Israeli officials told it that the groups had not left 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 deliberately chosen cases like the baby girl, where an argument could not be made that she is a security threat.
The aid organization funding the transplant, Children Not Numbers, said Wednesday that they are still waiting for permission from Israeli authorities to leave with Sadeel’s parents. One of the parents is the planned organ donor.
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No one is denying that there is a security problem in our area, and Israel does everything they can to justify it. “But this argument is not a magical word and you cannot justify just ignoring human disasters that are happening.”
In Washington, D.C., Rebuilding Alliance, a California-based aid group, has been lobbying members of Congress to pressure Israel to create a steady pipeline of medical evacuations and to 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 operation was carried out in coordination with the international community, according to the Israeli military. The military allowed sick and injured patients and their escort to leave.
Over 10,000 sick and wounded people need urgent care in Gaza, but it’s only available outside the enclave. They include those wounded in airstrikes, as well as cancer patients, children with life-threatening illnesses and older people who need open-heart surgery.
The main point of entry for Gazans into Egypt was closed after Israeli forces captured the border in May. The Israeli military said that the gateway was closed in protest by Egypt, and that the Gazan part of it was destroyed in a fire.