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A slow convoy of a dozen ambulances and buses brought 25 wounded and sick Palestinian children from Gaza and across Israel on Tuesday, past the heavily armed forces that bombarded the territory for 15 months, and that may be about to start again.
The patients were among the 4,500 people in Gaza believed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be in urgent need of evacuation, and they were transferred to Jordan by a joint operation by the Jordanian army, the country’s health ministry and the WHO.
The journey started at the Kerem Shalom crossing, which was the main portal of entry for humanitarian assistance through most of the war, and during the six-week ceasefire that followed.
Now that Benjamin Netanyahu has cut off all aid from entering Gaza, Kerem Shalom is all but deserted. The large car park, formerly full of aid trucks, was empty on Tuesday, except for a few soldiers and the Jordanian visitors.
Four Jordanian air force helicopters landed on an apron of asphalt, to fly four children in particularly critical condition to Amman for emergency care. The remaining 25 came out in large ambulances, including buses for their parents, guardians and young siblings.
They drove up from the southern tip where Gaza, Israel and Egypt meet, and through the area of kibbutzes and farmland where the war started on 7 October 2023 with a surprise and ferocious assault by Hamas on the rural community, in which Palestinian militants killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians.
The convoy headed north past lines of Merkava tanks and their troops, who have been ordered to take a heightened state of readiness for war as the ceasefire stalled at the end of its first six-week phase.
The motorcade climbed up the hills to Jerusalem and then down the steep descent through the occupied West Bank into the Jordan valley, finally skirting its way around a long line of trucks and cars that had built up when the Israeli immigration service workers went on a short strike for part of the morning.
By the time the children and their parents arrived in Jordan, the sun had gone down and they were exhausted, the long day encased in the ambulances made more tiring by the Ramadan fast.
Ahlam Darwish had brought her 16-month-old boy, Malik, who had been hit in the eye during an Israeli bombardment. They were from the al-Shati camp in northern Gaza, but Malik had been injured after they had been displaced by the war and the family was staying in a tent. Ahlam said a fragment from a tent pole had lodged in his eye and he needed urgent surgery.
Surgery is not an option in Gaza, where about 80% of hospitals and clinics have been destroyed, and 1,000 doctors, nurses and other medical workers have been killed.
“Nothing was possible in Gaza,” Ahlam said, trying to keep her exhausted, squirming child in her lap. Life had begun to improve gradually over the six weeks of the ceasefire, but Netanyahu’s blockade imposed on Sunday instantly triggered a doubling in the price of flour and sugar, and along with it, the dread of renewed bombing.
Seven-year-old Nada was swinging her legs off the back of another ambulance, breathing in the cool night air after a stifling day of driving. She was born with a hole in her heart and her health had been deteriorating steadily in recent months.
Her mother, who did not give her name, heard last Friday that Nada was on the list of medical evacuees, but from then to the moment the ambulances arrived in Jordan, the trip was uncertain.
“Everybody in Gaza just needs to know what their future will be. Whether we will be able to rebuild, and go back to life,” she said.
“Nada will get the care she needs here, that would have been impossible in Gaza,” said Tariq al-Hamdan, an emergency room medic from Amman’s King Hussein hospital. The convoy had first set out from Amman at 4am, and had spent long periods of time at the border where the paperwork was scrutinised, but he was still elated that the mission had finally succeeded after a series of postponements and the uncertainty brought by the blockade.
“We just wish we could have taken more children,” al-Hamdan said.
The Jordanian government’s plan is to evacuate 2,000 of Gaza’s child patients in critical condition, so Tuesday’s operation was only a very small step in that direction. Under the agreement with Israel, the next group of children can only be evacuated once this group has been treated and returned to Gaza. By that time there is no guarantee the war will not have returned.
