Briefing Paper September 2019 (13)
Gaza exit permits: Aisha’s lone journey for cancer treatment Maram Humaid Al Jazeera 22/05/19
Last month, five-year-old Aisha came home from nursery vomiting and saying she had a headache. Her condition deteriorated, so her family took her to hospital, where, after undergoing medical checks, they had every parent’s worst fear confirmed. Aisha was diagnosed with brain cancer. “The news hit me like a thunderbolt,” Mona Lulu, Aisha’s mother, told Al Jazeera from her home in the al-Bureij refugee camp. Aisha underwent urgent surgery in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City but she needed a medical transfer to go to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in occupied East Jerusalem for further treatment. But when it came time to decide which of her parents would go with her, the family found the decision was out of their hands. When Aisha woke up, her family were on the phone, eagerly waiting to talk to her. The little girl only had one question: “When are you coming?” she repeated, over and over. “She just cried over the phone,” Mona said, openly weeping. “If I was by her side, I would have comforted her, held her to my chest, taken care of her.”…
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Sick Gaza child caught in Israeli permit system dies Isabel Debre & Fares Akram AP 12/6/19
As her condition deteriorated, the child was returned to Gaza unconscious. One week later, she was dead. A photo of Aisha smiling softly in her hospital bed, brown curls swaddled in bandages, drew an outpouring on social media. The wrenching details of her last days have shined a light on Israel’s vastly complex and stringent system for issuing Gaza exit permits. It is a bureaucracy that has Israeli and Palestinian authorities blaming each other for its shortfalls, while inflicting a heavy toll on Gaza’s sick children and their parents … So far this year, roughly half of applications for patient companion permits were rejected or left unanswered by Israel, according to the World Health Organization. That has forced over 600 patients, including some dozen children under 18, to make the trek out of the territory alone or without close family by their side…
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