A cancer center in Jordan treats kids from Gaza, but only a few dozen have arrived

AMMAN, Jordan — The King Hussein Cancer Center is huge and gleaming, with steel beams and floor-to-ceiling windows. Cozy cafes and stocked snack machines dot the air-conditioned lobby. It’s a stark contrast to conditions in Gaza, from where dozens of its latest patients have come.

“We couldn’t find food and wherever we went there were airstrikes,” says Safa Salha, who spent months going from damaged hospital to damaged hospital, seeking treatment for her 16-year-old son Youssef.

Youssef, a tall, quiet teenager who lets his mother do most of the talking, was in 10th grade before the war between Israel and Hamas started in October 2023 and shut down all the schools.

Last year, he was operated on in Gaza for a brain tumor pressing down on his optic nerve. His mother says the hospital was unable to do MRI scans before the surgery and couldn’t conduct a biopsy. Surgeons removed as much of the tumor as they could and sent him home two days later because they needed the bed, his mother says.

“The hardest thing was the decision to do the surgery,” says Salha, a teacher and school activities organizer. “You don’t know if the doctors were going to be able to finish the surgery, you don’t know if there’s medicine available, you don’t know if he was going to die during the surgery, or if we were going to die while he was there.”

Gaza health care in ruins

All of Gaza’s hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed in Israeli airstrikes. Israel says it has targeted Hamas sites rather than civilian infrastructure.

In January, the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said Israeli attacks had killed 1,000 health care workers, a figure Gaza’s Health Ministry says has now grown to more than 1,400. Due to an Israeli blockade on food and medicine, hospitals that are partially opening do so with severe shortages of medicine, anesthesia and basic supplies.

UNICEF says more than 50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or injured during the war, which began after the militant group Hamas launched a cross-border attack into Israel. Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 55,000 people, many of them women and children, have died. Israel says nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreigners were killed in the initial Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

Israel this spring intensified its attacks and aid agencies said in March that more than 12,000 people require urgent medical evacuation out of Gaza, including at least 4,500 children.

In February, President Trump suggested a plan to take over Gaza, displacing Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt while turning the enclave into a U.S.-controlled zone featuring beach-front property. Many Palestinians in Gaza were already displaced from their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948.

The relocation plan is seen by Jordan as an existential threat to the small kingdom, a death knell for hopes of an eventual Palestinian state and tantamount to complicity in ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The king pledges to help 2,000 sick children

King Abdullah told Trump that Jordan was prepared to bring 2,000 child cancer patients and other extremely sick children to Jordan for treatment as quickly as possible.

But almost four months later, only a few dozen patients have arrived.

“There have been difficulties imposed by the Israeli authorities that are stopping the way of making this happen smoothly,” said Mohammad al-Momani, Jordan’s government communication minister.

Jordanian officials say Israel, which controls the Gaza border, has obstructed exit visas needed for medical evacuations for some patients and guardians needed to travel with them. It’s a long-standing issue: Physicians for Human Rights in Israel has taken the Israeli government to court to try to force them to allow more patients out.

The Israeli military did not respond to NPR queries about obstructing exit visas. The United Nations’ World Health Organization, which works with Israeli authorities and oversees logistics for medical evacuations, deferred comment to Israel.

Deadly delays

Health officials say delays in evacuations have meant diminished chances of survival for some of the sickest children, who elsewhere would receive immediate treatment.

“What we are seeing is really particular to Gaza patients — they are more advanced diseases,” says the King Hussein Cancer Center chief of pediatrics Rawad Rihani. “Cases where the tumor is very advanced with the lack of proper treatment and proper evaluation, or proper diagnosis, which makes them very hard to treat.”

Rihani says some of the tumors have grown so large they have damaged the children’s organs, leaving them in excruciating pain. With Israel’s strict controls on food and medicine entering Gaza, many of the patients are malnourished.

“These patients require intensive care unit support, they require respiratory support and they require a lot of nutritional support as well,” she says. “It makes the tumor very difficult to treat.”

Even though most childhood cancers are treatable, Rihani says, not all of the children evacuated to Jordan survive.

“Some of them are very advanced and went to palliative care,” Rihani says. “Unfortunately we are not able to save everyone.”

Jordan also operates two field hospitals in Gaza and was the major corridor for aid going to the territory by truck and air before Israel blocked aid shipments in March.

The King Hussein Cancer Center is one of the region’s leading cancer hospitals. Rihani says it has 44 pediatric cancer beds and 24 beds for pediatric bone marrow transplants, which can be supplemented by other hospitals that also treat cancer. Some of the arrivals require only out-patient treatment.

Rihani says no cancer patients treated in Jordan since the start of the Gaza war have been sent back to Gaza. Jordan has been criticized though for sending people back during the continuing conflict it says have fully completed treatment for other illnesses.

“We are bringing them by batches,” says Momani, the communications minister. “We will take these children to treat them but then after they finish their treatment they should be going back to their homeland. We don’t want to be in any way helping the displacement of Palestinians.”

Hunger stalking Gaza

With so many obstacles, patients and their families who have been evacuated to Jordan and other countries are among the very lucky few.

Zainab al-Astal arrived in Jordan with her sons Qassim, 15, and Ahmed, 13, in mid-May. Both the boys have lymphoma.

Displaced repeatedly by Israeli airstrikes, there was hardly any food, not even bread. Here, Astal says Ahmed has been dazzled by the abundance of shawarma — a sandwich of sliced chicken roasted on a spit.

“He says he wants to sit in the restaurant all day and just keep eating,” she says.

The day they were evacuated from Gaza, the Astals had gathered with other patients and guardians near a bus at the Gaza European Hospital to drive to the border when Israel bombed the complex, according to patients and the World Health Organization. Gaza civil defense authorities say at least 28 people, including patients, were killed in the airstrikes.

Israel said it was targeting a Hamas command and control center under the hospital. Israel released footage showing what it said were tunnels under the hospital complex to bolster its claim, but the heavily edited video could not be independently confirmed.

“I knew it was going to land near us but I couldn’t move,” says Astal. She says the impact threw the boys in the air and rained down so much debris she couldn’t see for 10 minutes.

Strangers threw themselves on the ground over the boys to protect them, she says.

The teenagers themselves speak very matter-of-factly about the bombings.

Leen al-Dabbas, a clinical psychologist at the cancer center, says many of the children are suffering from “masked depression” — not yet able to process what they’ve been through.

“When they first arrive they are in an adjustment period,” she says.

For many families the fear for their own lives has been replaced by relentless worry over loved ones they left behind in Gaza.

One girl, Suhair Zouroub, 13, sits with her mother Shayma’ and younger brother, a blue hospital bracelet on her thin wrist, ahead of her first rounds of chemotherapy.

She was diagnosed two months ago with leukemia. When she suffered seizures in Gaza, there was no treatment available. She describes huddling together with all of the family, hugging each other during the airstrikes. Her 2-1/2-year-old brother, Jude, pipes up with the word tiyara, Arabic for “plane.”

The eighth-grader had a 98% grade point average and says she wants to be an international lawyer.

“It’s very nice here,” she says in a quiet voice. “But Gaza is more beautiful. Nothing can ever be like home.”