War victims Sick children in Gaza face grim lottery

It was a short distance but a very long journey from a bombed-out hospital in Gaza to the Jordanian border. Zeinab al-Astal arrived with her two sick sons as dusk was falling on Wednesday, and seemed stunned they had made it at all.

- Emma Graham-Harrison

Twenty-four hours earlier she had been watching chunks of ceiling crash down to the floor around them, after Israel bombed the European hospital in Khan Younis where they were staying. "This medical evacuation saved us," she said, minutes after crossing into Jordan, where Ahmad, 13, and Qassem, 15, will get treatment for leukaemia something that is now almost impossible inside Gaza.

Medical equipment has been destroyed, medicines are running out, one in three hospitals have been closed by attacks, those partly functioning are overcrowded with victims of airstrikes, and the ranks of doctors and nurses have been decimated by Israeli detention and killings.

The Astal brothers and other cancer patients are doubly unlucky children, trapped in a brutal war while also fighting their own traumatic battles against a deadly disease. Their best hope of survival is to apply for treatment abroad, and then wait for Israeli authorities' response although trying to get an exit permit can feel like a grim lottery.

Qassem was diagnosed with cancer a year and a half before the family reached Jordan, and Ahmad has been ill for nearly a year, needing regular blood transfusions in recent months.

The urgent need for medical evacuations from Gaza outstripped capacity even before the war, and the UN estimates there are now more than 12,000 people who need to travel for treatment they cannot get inside the strip.

The backlog is so great that the World Health Organization director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned in January that unless Israel allowed greater numbers to leave, it would take five or 10 years for all children in need of help to reach hospitals where they could be treated.

Nine-year-old Sama has a brain tumour, and the seizures it causes have been getting steadily worse.