I want to go home”, claims Amira again and again, lying in her bed at the Augusta Victoria hospital in East Jerusalem. At the age of 11, she has just completed radiotherapy treatment for a brain tumor and, exhausted, she does not understand why she cannot return to her native Gaza.
The mother, Iman al-Aixeh, does not let go of the little girl, who reproaches her with boredom and discomfort in her eyes for not being able to see her grandparents, father and sister. With a hint of a smile, Iman says that she takes refuge in “the patience” that God is giving her at this moment and in the certainty of knowing “what is good for my daughter”.
Like Iman and Amira, more than 200 companions and Palestinian patients from Gaza have been blocked since October 7 in two hospitals in the occupied part of Jerusalem – in Augusta Victoria and Makassed -, after the authorities to suspend the permits of all Gazans who were in Israel and the West Bank.
Thanks to the intervention of the heads of the hospitals, they now have weekly leave. But Israel controls each renewal, subject to whether their treatments continue (especially for tumors and renal peritonitis) or whether the patients are still alive. In the case of the Augusta Victoria, of the 100 Gazans it housed since the beginning of the war, three patients died and their three companions were deported to Gaza, with a contingent of about 4,000 workers who were in Jericho . For the 94 Gazans who are still in the medical center belonging to the Lutheran Church, time has been reduced to rooms, corridors and courtyards. They eat and sleep there or in hotels in the complex, and only get around with hospital transport. Leaving this circuit exposes them to being arrested by soldiers or police, and even then they are not exempt from being detained, as happened to dozens of Gazans in an Israeli raid inside Makassed, on November 2.
“Jerusalem is a hot spot and we have to take care of the patients”, warns an employee as she tours the pediatric oncology unit. From the rooms, children and chaperones return cordial greetings and some warm gestures, although no one is in the mood to speak. A sadness that, despite the effort to attend to the sick, is shared by the staff.
In standard greetings, “how are you” has been replaced by a sad grimace. “We don’t ask that question today because we don’t really know how to feel. We are frustrated, disappointed, powerless”, says Fadi Atrash, director of the Augusta Victòria. “The patients are in a very, very difficult situation – he expands -. They came to fight the disease. They suffer from cancer, they suffer from being away from their families. And on top of that they have to be worried all the time, every minute, about the lives of their loved ones in Gaza.” Caught up in the news, hoping “that none of my relatives appear”, Iman lives “with her nerves on edge” and “between two fires”: “My daughter is here and she is out of danger. But on the other hand, the rest of my family and my other daughter are in Gaza. I feel very tired and mentally I am not stable”.
His face shows the more than six weeks of anguish, accentuated by the difficulties in talking to his family. “Out of every 50 call attempts, they only answer once. We mainly talk through written messages”, he explains.
What he does know is that Israeli bombing leveled his parents’ house in Rimal, his neighborhood in Gaza City. They, like her husband and her other daughter, are alive and have fled to the south, as far as Khan Iunis. But there “the situation is very bad”. Without electricity, gas or food, their relatives ration the little flour they have left to make bread.
The contrast demoralizes trapped Gazans. “Here they have food and there (in Gaza) they don’t; here they have water and electricity, there they don’t. It’s frustrating for them, it causes them depression,” says Atrash. “We try not to let them feel alone and we give them psychosocial support.”
Doctors, nurses and social workers are eager to entertain the children, talk to the adults or bring a phone to facilitate communication with the Strip. “They give us everything we need, they are very good to us – emphasizes Iman-. And thank God, there are other people from Gaza here, so we can chat with each other.”
A contact that doctors also try to maintain with their patients and colleagues in Gaza. Atrash is struggling to bring around 500 cancer patients who had scheduled appointments after October 7. “We have to press to bring them, we know them. We have to make an effort to get the wounded out,” he insists while pointing out that Israel has refused his requests to receive patients from Gaza or send medicine to the strip.
In this context, and despite her contradictory feelings, Iman is convinced that staying in the hospital is the best option, because “Amira has adequate treatment and follow-up here”. “I would return to Gaza only when my daughter is healthy, because there are no medical centers there, they have been destroyed. And it will take a long time to rebuild Gaza.”
