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KHAN YOUNIS: The father of 18-year-old Hassan who says his son was shot in the head over two months ago in Gaza while out seeking food hopes that the reopening of the Rafah border point will save him.
“The Rafah crossing is our lifeline, for patients and for the Gaza Strip,” Ibrahim Qlob told Reuters in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where Hassan lies motionless in bed, his eyes covered with bandages.
“I’m waiting. One day passing for me feels like a year.”
The injury caused a brain haemorrhage, necessitating the removal of part of his skull. A later infection caused him to lose sight in his right eye, his father said.
Now that a fragile ceasefire is taking hold between Israel and Hamas after two years of war, Hassan is just one of 15,600 Gazan patients waiting evacuation, including 3,800 children, according to the World Health Organization.
Many like him suffer from injuries sustained during the conflict. Others have chronic conditions like cancer and heart disease which the decimated health system cannot cope with.
Israeli officials have said the Rafah crossing previously used for patients to exit via Egypt would reopen for transfers.
Two sources told Reuters people could start crossing on Thursday. COGAT, the arm of the Israeli military that oversees aid flows into Gaza, said on Wednesday the date for reopening for people will be announced later.
NOWHERE TO GO
During the conflict more than 7,000 patients have been evacuated from Gaza, with Egypt taking over half of them.
The rate of transfers slowed, however, when Rafah shut in May 2024 and Israel seized control. Since a previous ceasefire collapsed in March, fewer than four patients have exited daily, meaning it would take over 10 years to finish the list, WHO data shows.
“What we need is more countries to accept patients from Gaza, and we need the restoration of all the medical evacuation routes,” the WHO’s Tarik Jasarevic told reporters this week.
Mohammed Abu Nasser, 32, who survived a strike on his home in Zeitoun, Gaza City with severe injuries to both legs, said he has been on the waiting list over a year.
“My condition is getting worse every day,” he said from Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.
DYING CHILDREN
Hundreds have already died waiting, medical groups and Palestinian health authorities say. The WHO, which took over management of the process last year, said 740 people including 137 children on the list have died since July 2024.
One of them was a girl called Jana Ayad who died from severe acute malnutrition in September, the WHO told Reuters, saying no country accepted her.
Médecins Sans Frontières project coordinator Hani Isleem said that 19 of its patients on the transfer list had died during the war, including 12 children.
“Seeing those patients’ files, being in direct touch with these children, and then you know that you lost them because of all these challenges and difficulties, that is really painful,” he said.
Israeli rejections have sometimes prevented transfers, Isleem added. COGAT did not respond to a request for comment. It has previously said that approvals are subject to security checks.
“The mortality rate is tragically rising, as would be expected given the decimation of health systems and infrastructure on the ground,” said Kate Takes, a solicitor with Children Not Numbers, a UK-based charity working in Gaza and overseeing cases of children needing evacuation.
For Hassan, there are worrying signs. His malnutrition is worsening and he now weighs just 40 kilograms (88 lbs), or nearly half his former body weight, his father said.
“If things stay like this, it will be too late for him.”

GABES, Tunisia: Several thousand people rallied in southern Tunisia on Wednesday, calling for the closure of an aging chemicals factory which locals have blamed for a host of poisonings and health issues.
As the procession reached the vicinity of the vast factory of the Tunisian Chemical Group, a public company, police fired large amounts of tear gas. Hundreds of people retreated, but groups of young people remained shouting their anger, while several individuals fainted, according to an AFP correspondent on site.
In recent weeks scores of people have been hospitalized in the city of Gabes, with residents pointing the finger at the potentially cancer-causing waste from a phosphate processing plant nearby.
“This has to stop. My three kids and I are asthmatic, my husband and my mother died from cancer as a result” of the plant, 52-year-old protester Lamia Ben Mohamed told AFP.
“We want to breathe,” the protesters chanted, while dozens of motorcycles at the head of the rally honked their horns.

According to an AFP journalist at the scene and police sources, the crowd’s size began at around 2,000 people before growing to several thousand.
Organized by the Stop Pollution collective, the rally demanded the shuttering of the aging fertilizer plant, whose discharges into the Mediterranean Sea have long sown discontent among Gabes residents.
They blame the plant for collapsed fishing stocks, beach pollution, respiratory diseases and cancer.
That outcry has intensified in the past month. The rally comes a day after 122 people had to be treated or hospitalized for cases blamed on the plant, according to a local official with knowledge of the figures.
Marwa Salah, 33, a cardiologist at Gabes Regional Hospital, said she wanted to “live without the pollution from the complex that has brought us nothing.”
Wrapped in the Tunisian flag or holding yellow banners bearing a skull, protesters carried signs reading “Stop genocide,” “Gabes without oxygen,” and “The complex is killing us under the state’s watch.”
According to Slah Ben Hamed, regional leader of the UGTT union, the recent waves of poisoning were caused by “outdated equipment” and “gas leaks.”
Fertilizer production requires treating phosphates with sulfuric acid and ammonia.
Although the Tunisian state had promised in 2017 to begin the plant’s gradual closure, authorities earlier this year said they would ramp up production instead.
Experts have cast doubt on the possibility of cleaning up a complex first inaugurated in 1972.