Twenty-one Palestinian children with cancer to get treatment abroad: Gaza ministry
Gaza’s Ministry of Health has said that a children’s relief organisation in the US cooperated with the World Health Organization to coordinate the exit from the besieged enclave of 21 Palestinian children with cancer.
More than 25,000 children need treatment abroad, it added.
Palestinian patients, sit inside a vehicle before being transferred for treatment abroad through Kerem Shalom crossing in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip
It's something, yet there are over 9,000 cancer patients in Gaza. Will it be just another photo op, or the start of more evacuations. Of course what should be done is getting the hospitals back in functioning order in Gaza.
‘Most of our patients were children’: US health workers recount missions to Gaza
Even after surviving horrific bombing injuries, patients in Gaza’s few working hospitals are still dying from infections due to lack of medical supplies, while many victims are children, US health workers who have returned from the war-torn territory said.
Adam Hamawy, a former US Army combat surgeon, told the AFP news agency that humanitarian aid must enter Gaza in “sufficient volumes to meet the demands”.
“The level of civilian casualties that I experienced was beyond anything I’d seen before,” Hamawy said in an interview following a medical mission to Gaza’s European Hospital last month.
“Most of our patients were children under the age of 14,” said the 54-year-old medic, who has volunteered in warzones and natural disaster-hit countries for the past 30 years.
“You could give all you want, you can donate,” Hamawy said. “But if these borders [in Gaza] don’t open up to allow that aid to get in, then it’s just useless,” he said.
Palestinian girl Eman al-Kholi, whose limb was amputated after being wounded in an Israeli strike that killed her parents, lies on a bed as she receives treatment at the European Hospital in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, in December 2023
Bodies of thousands of missing children under the rubble in Gaza: UNICEF
UNICEF deputy executive director, Ted Chaiban, has told the UN Security Council that “the bodies of thousands of missing children remain buried under the rubble” in Gaza.
Chaiban was speaking at a special UNSC meeting on the UN chief’s recent report on violations against children in armed conflict.
“In 2023, 4,312 Palestinian and 70 Israeli children were verified as killed or maimed, representing 37 percent of all verified cases of killing and maiming included in the report,” Chaiban said.
But the number of children who remain buried under the rubble, and a lack of access for humanitarian actors, means that the UN was unable to include thousands more reported cases of children killed from Gaza in the report, he added.
