Jud Awad can heal from leukemia, but then the Netherlands must allow them to be taken from Gaza

Jud Awad, a 15 -month -old girl, has had persistent elevation for a few weeks, little appetite, she is pale and listless. Her mother takes her to the doctor, and he refers her to the Al-AQSA hospital in Gaza for an investigation. The diagnosis: acute lymphatic leukemia. “A serious condition,” says general practitioner Shakib Sana from Leerdam. “But good to treat with chemotherapy.” However, not in the AL-AQSA, one of the few still functioning hospitals in an area where Israel has been bombing for 22 months interrupted by a single ceasefire.

Her doctor does two things: he puts Jud Awad on the official list of people who have to be evacuated for medical reasons. And he asks a Dutch colleague, general practitioner Shakib Sana, for help.

Sana has been in contact with his Gazan colleague for some time, he says. “With a small club of doctors we do consultations by telephone and WhatsApp.” He also treats the father of this doctor remotely, who suffers from metastatic prostate cancer and needs palliative care.

Zoom in

Sana has been getting the girl Gaza out since Saturday, with zero results. That is why he decided on Thursday morning to make an emergency call on his LinkedIn profile. With her mother’s permission, he put a photo of Jud Awad Online. “I deliberately opted for the least confrontational.” Because of her illness, the girl is under the bruises and her face has now been paralyzed half -sided by the swelling in her lymph nodes. He posted the official documents of the Gazan Ministry of Health in which chemotherapy is recommended.

Seven -step

Evacuation from Gaza can only start through the World Health Organization (WHO), a procedure that has seven steps, with a diagnosis (1), an official advice from the Gazan Health Minister (2), placement on an evacuation list (3) to actual evacuation (7). Jud Awad seems to be stranded at step 5, whereby the WHO offers the list of medical evacuees in countries that want to take patients. The Netherlands is not on that list and has, according to a spokesperson for aid organization Save the Childrenno one Gazan patient in a Dutch hospital for the past 22 months. “We would like to hear if we are wrong.”

Figures from the WHO show that since 7 October 2023 7,507 patients have been removed from Gaza, including 5,201 children. Most ended up in hospitals in the region: Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. 244 people have been treated in European hospitals in the last two years. Italy caught people, Luxembourg and Belgium, but not the Netherlands. That is, says a spokesperson for Doctors Without Borders, because the Dutch government is in favor of reception in the region. 653 evacuations involved cancer patients.

For Thursday’s parliamentary debate on the war in Gaza, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a letter that acknowledges that there is a “large -scale defect” of medical infrastructure and medicines in Gaza. “The Netherlands supports medical evacuations that have recently taken place” and “investigates the possibility of financial and practical support for medical evacuations-also in EU context.”

Money and bureaucracy

General practitioner Sana has so far caught Bot at Dutch hospitals. “The will is there, but hospitals always encounter the same two problems.” Money and bureaucracy. “Such a chemo treatment costs around 100,000 euros, a hospital cannot afford it without government scheme.” We can, he says, fly kilos of food to Gaza, but “getting one child in this way is impossible.”

Laying the girl in a hospital in the region has not yet been successful. That could have to do with what aid organizations mention the most difficult step (6) in the WHO evacuation plan: permission from the Israeli government to get the patient out of Gaza. Sana: “Whether it takes so long that the patient has been sliding.”

Almost 15,000 patients are waiting for medical evacuation in Gaza.

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