Health & Healing
Israel bars Gaza's cancer patients from West Bank hospitals
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Exactly one patient from Gaza has been allowed to travel to a hospital in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, and only after an Israeli court overturned a government refusal, according to the World Health Organization's medical evacuation fact sheet dated 23 February 2026.
The same WHO tally records 11,124 patients evacuated out of Gaza since October 2023, including 5,835 children, together with 13,032 companions, and states that more than 18,500 patients urgently need treatment beyond the reach of the Strip's hospitals.
Cancer patients are a large share of that queue. Gaza's health ministry counts more than 11,000 cancer patients in the Strip, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported, and WHO data cited in the same OCHA update showed 564 cancer patients evacuated abroad since January 2025 — 215 men, 207 women and 142 children.
A study published in the Journal of the Egyptian Public Health Association in March 2026, drawing on WHO figures, put oncology evacuations between October 2023 and 29 September 2025 at 716, within 7,841 evacuations of all types. Inkstick, reporting in April 2026, cited a WHO total of 7,802 for October 2023 to September 2025. The two counts differ.
Before the war, WHO recorded 50 to 100 patients leaving Gaza for treatment every day, according to Inkstick.
Inside Gaza, oncology care was concentrated in one building. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, built with Turkish government funding through the aid agency TİKA on land allocated with the Islamic University of Gaza, opened in 2020 as the Strip's specialised cancer hospital, Anadolu Agency and Al Jazeera's Arabic encyclopedia reported. Quds Press put the cost of the 33-dunam medical and teaching complex at $50 million.
The hospital announced on 17 October 2023 that much of its service had stopped for lack of fuel, and the remainder ceased within 48 hours, according to the Institute for Palestine Studies project documenting attacks on Gaza's health sector. OCHA records it as non-operational from November 2023 after fuel ran out and it sustained heavy damage.
The Lancet Oncology reported that Israel demolished the hospital on 21 March 2025, in what footage suggested was a controlled explosion; Al-Haq dates the demolition to 20 March.
The Lancet Oncology said the Israeli military told The Times of Israel that the site was being used by Hamas operatives but did not provide evidence for the claim.
France 24 reported the military said it struck the hospital because Hamas fighters were operating there, and that Turkey said Israeli troops had at one point used the building as a base. Al Jazeera's Arabic encyclopedia cited satellite imagery from November 2023 to April 2024 showing Israeli military vehicles inside the compound.
The fallback closed too. OCHA reported that the European Gaza Hospital, the main referral centre for oncology patients in the south, shut in mid-May 2024.
What remains is thin. The petition filed to Israel's High Court in November 2025 stated that 75 percent of chemotherapy drugs are unavailable in Gaza and that the limited treatment still offered is confined to three medical facilities, according to the Israeli outlet Ha-Makom.
The historic referral route ran to East Jerusalem.
Augusta Victoria Hospital is the only specialised cancer hospital in Palestine, with radiotherapy and nuclear medicine unavailable elsewhere in the West Bank or Gaza, according to research published in the US National Library of Medicine's archive, which recorded 70 to 90 chemotherapy patients treated there daily before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Lutheran World Federation, which owns the hospital, says around 40 percent of its patients came from Gaza.
That route is closed. Five Israeli rights organisations — Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Gisha, HaMoked, Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel — petitioned the High Court on 20 November 2025 to compel Israel to resume evacuations to hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, arguing that roughly 16,500 Gaza residents are at risk of death, Gisha said.
On 12 January 2026, Haaretz reported, the Jerusalem District Court overturned the objections of Defence Minister Israel Katz and the military and permitted a 48-year-old Gaza resident to travel to Nablus for treatment, the judge ruling that his condition required immediate lifesaving care and refusing to stay the decision. Haaretz described the arrangement as narrow and of little practical use to the thousands waiting.
Weeks later, on 9 February, Gisha said Judge Ram Winograd of the same court dismissed a petition for a five-year-old with cancer who lives in the West Bank but is registered as a Gaza resident.
Gisha said the state told the court that the defence minister had personally decided against passage on the grounds that Gaza residents are barred from entering Israel for any purpose, and argued the family should seek a third country via the Allenby crossing, though the child's doctors said such a journey could endanger his life.
Gisha later reported that the Supreme Court accepted its appeal and allowed the child to be treated.
On 15 February, Haaretz reported, 32 senior Israeli physicians — among them serving and former hospital directors and a former health ministry director-general — asked to join the High Court petition.
WHO's published recommendations are to increase the number of states accepting patients, restore the medical corridor to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and expand corridors through Egypt and Jordan. Correspondence published in The Lancet Global Health in March 2026 said the East Jerusalem Hospital Network is ready to receive patients and that Augusta Victoria can take 50 new oncology patients a day.
Al Jazeera reported on 11 June that more than 60 members of the US Congress called on Israel to lift restrictions preventing Gaza's cancer patients from reaching West Bank and East Jerusalem hospitals, and that WHO suspended evacuations to Egypt in April after Israeli forces shot and killed a medical contractor.
Deaths in the queue are counted by the health ministry. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, citing those figures, said 1,092 patients died awaiting evacuation between July 2024 and 28 November 2025; WHO has warned the true number is likely higher because lists change and paperwork stalls.
Whether the corridor reopens now rests with the High Court. Writing in Mekomit in February, Tirtza Leibovitz, deputy director for programmes at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, said the petition was moving sluggishly. No decision on it has been announced.
