Humanitarian workers welcome the gesture but say it is a “drop in the ocean” as children continue to bear the scars of war in Gaza.
The European Union has coordinated the medical evacuation of severely ill and injured patients from Gaza for the first time, transferring sixteen children through the Egyptian capital of Cairo to Spain on Wednesday.
The evacuated children – thirteen of whom have sustained severe injuries as a result of the Israeli offensive in Gaza – will be transferred to hospitals across Spain on Thursday, according to the Spanish Health Ministry, and are accompanied by 27 family members.
It’s the first time the EU has financed and coordinated such evacuations since the war broke out following Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, which engulfed the Gaza Strip in a humanitarian crisis that has claimed the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians, including an estimated 14,000 children.
While humanitarian experts have welcomed the move, they have also described it as a “drop in the ocean” as the war continues to take a catastrophic toll on children in Gaza.
“Your role (as a child in Gaza) is to keep escaping death every other day, when the Israeli army is sending evacuation orders and you just flee to another zone, not knowing if your family will come with you,” Aseel Baidoun of Medical Aid for Palestinians, told Euronews.
“Evacuations are needed, they’re vital. There’s no access to healthcare in Gaza, so at least we’re glad that 16 children can get the medical medical care they need,” she added. “But I know that there are 20,000 children missing in Gaza. We have tens of thousands injured. So this number is only a drop in the ocean. We need to evacuate hundreds on a daily basis to be able to actually save some of the children in Gaza.”
The European Commission says that the operation was supported by the EU’s Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) following a request for assistance from the World Health Organisation (WHO). A spokesperson added that more similar operations were being planned in the upcoming weeks.
It comes over two months after the executive asked member states to indicate their “readiness” to treat either severely ill or injured patients from Gaza. At the time, the WHO had provided the bloc with a list of 109 children ready to be transferred to European hospitals.
Only seven of 27 member states – Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania, Slovakia and Spain – have offered to treat or assist the transport of patients so far.
Evacuation plans were recently scuppered after the Rafah crossing was seized and closed in an Israeli offensive in early May, trapping sick and injured Palestinians requiring treatment abroad. It has also further limited the amount of critical aid arriving to the besieged enclave by land.
“The needs on the ground in Gaza after more than nine months are so massive that what needs to happen is for more consistent and sustained aid and entry of aid into Gaza, but for it to be effectively distributed to all areas of Gaza where civilians are living,” Sarah Davies, Public Relations Officer for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told Euronews.
According to the Axios news agency, ceasefire talks between US, Israeli and Palestinian officials last week included plans to re-open the Rafah crossing that connects Egypt with the Gaza Strip.
On Wednesday, the WHO revised the number of patients requiring urgent evacuation from Gaza to 14,000.
Famine and disease compound crisis
The EU’s humanitarian aid commissioner Janez Lenarčič said that “medical evacuations are more crucial than ever” at a time when Gaza hospitals are “overwhelmed” and access to healthcare “severely affected by the ongoing war.”
“Israel and all the actors involved in these operations must continue honouring their commitment and facilitate the needed access for evacuations to continue.”
But experts warn that evacuations alone can do little to address the multiple crises facing children in Gaza.
Over 14,000 children are estimated to have been killed in the war in Gaza since last October according to the Hamas-run health ministry, a number higher than in four years of world conflict. Hundreds of thousands more have been displaced from their homes, some multiple times. Others are severely malnourished in pockets of the enclave where famine has spread.
“The situation in Gaza, particularly for children, is really an unending nightmare. Babies are being born during this conflict. Other children who are older have already lived through countless rounds of escalations in the years prior,” Davies said. “And now most, if not all, children have been displaced at least once or twice from their homes. They’ve really had to leave everything they know behind.”
“We know that children are usually the most vulnerable when it comes to malnutrition, when it comes to communicable diseases such as hepatitis A. We know that almost every child got really sick during the war,” Baidoun added.
Concern is growing over the potential spread of the highly infectious poliovirus in the war-torn Gaza Strip after the disease was identified in samples of sewage, with experts warning non-vaccinated children are most at risk.
The Israeli Defence Forces have launched a campaign to vaccinate its soldiers against the vaccine-derived disease, while children in Gaza remain exposed.
