The pace of medical evacuations of sick and wounded Palestinians out of Gaza, including several thousand children, is so slow it will take five to 10 years to clear the backlog at the current rate, the World Health Organization has said.
Rik Peeperkorn, the UN global health body’s representative for the West Bank and Gaza, said only 78 of 12,000 patients requiring evacuation had managed to leave recently.
Among the 12,000, according to the UN children’s agency Unicef, are 2,500 children, some of whom have died during an often months-long wait to leave for hospitals outside.
The Israeli military often takes months to respond to medical evacuation requests, and the number of evacuations has plunged in recent months.
Since the war began on 7 October 2023, 5,230 patients have been evacuated, according to Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson.
But that rate has slowed since May, when the southern Rafah border crossing to Egypt was closed, with only 342 patients having been evacuated, she said, an average of fewer than two a day.
In a rare exception in November, 200 seriously injured and ill Palestinians and their carers were evacuated from Gaza, in one of the biggest operations of its kind in months, Israel has said.
In some cases, the military rejects either the patient or, in the case of children, the caregivers accompanying them on vague security grounds or with no explanation.
The Israeli decisions appear to be “arbitrary and are not made on a criteria nor logic”, said Moeen Mahmood, the Jordan country director for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Cogat, the Israeli military agency in charge of humanitarian affairs for Palestinians, said in a statement to the Associated Press that it “makes every effort to approve the departure of children and their families for medical treatments, subject to a security check”.
A military official said Israel’s internal intelligence service reviews whether the patient or their escort have what he called “a connection to terrorism”, and if one is found they are refused. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential procedures.
In August MSF applied to the Israeli military to evacuate 32 children and their caregivers, but only six were allowed to leave.
In November, it applied for eight others, including a two-year-old with leg amputations, but Israeli authorities blocked evacuation, it said.
The military official said five of the eight requests in November were approved but the caregivers trying to travel with the children were rejected on security grounds. The official said MSF would have to resubmit the requests with different escorts. The official did not say why the other three children were not approved.
Additionally, Peeperkorn said one of the few remaining hospitals in northern Gaza was hit by an Israeli attack on Friday without any prior warning. “There was no official warning or evacuation order before the bombing of … the hospital, only rumours that spread panic,” he said.
The director of Kamal Adwan hospital said earlier that Israel conducted several attacks on Friday that hit the facility, one of the last functioning health centres in the northern area.
Four hospital staff were among a large number of wounded and dead, Hussam Abu Safia said in a statement. “There was a series of airstrikes on the northern and western sides of the hospital, accompanied by intense and direct fire.”
Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed at least 44,612 Palestinians and wounded 104,834 since 7 October 2023, the Palestinian territory’s health ministry said on Friday.
Agencies contributed to this report
