At 5am on Tuesday, 8 March 2022, medical sources at Al-Sadaqa Turkish Hospital, southern Gaza City, pronounced dead a 14-year-old patient named Loai Mohammed Al-Tawil, a resident of Al-Nusairat refugee camp in the Middle Area district. Al-Tawil had brain cancer.  

In his testimony to Al Mezan, Osama Al-Tawil, 50, who served as the child’s registered accompanier to the hospital, said:

My nephew obtained a medical referral from the Palestinian Ministry of Health and had a hospital appointment at Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem scheduled for 8 February 2022. The Israeli authorities at Erez Crossing did not allow his mother to escort him, but they approved my request instead. When we arrived at the hospital, the doctors did a brain biopsy to examine the tumor and the preliminary results showed the need of radiotherapy treatment. The doctors told me I needed to take my nephew to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, where the treatment is available. We coordinated with Augusta Victoria Hospital to transfer the child, but they refused to receive him without financial coverage. As a result, we returned to the Gaza Strip on 2 March 2022 to submit a request for a new referral with financial coverage and a new hospital appointment. The following day on 3 March 2022, the child’s health condition seriously deteriorated and he was admitted to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza and then referred to Al-Sadaqa Turkish Hospital on 6 March 2022, where he obtained an urgent medical referral and financial coverage. However, the child could not make it and died at 5am on Tuesday, 8 March 2022.

Al Mezan condemns the recurrence of such incidents where hospitals in the West Bank refuse to receive patients from the Gaza Strip without financial coverage, and deplores the complex medical referral system which ignores the seriousness of patients’ conditions. The Center calls on the Ministry of Health and the competent authorities to reconsider the medical referral system for patients from the Gaza Strip, in particular the procedures related to the request of financial coverage and coordination with hospitals. Already caught in Israeli’s complex, slow and opaque permit system, patients from Gaza need a Ministry of Health system that serves to expedite cases, rather than further hinder access to healthcare.