Coping with cancer and its treatment requires immense inner strength. Yet rather than offering support, Israel’s permit regime complicates patients’ lives by delaying and preventing access to treatment. In this grim reality, the fight to improve the permit mechanism may only offer temporary relief, if any.

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Israel’s all-encompassing control has left Gaza’s health services in a dire state of underdevelopment, forcing the referral of patients to better-equipped hospitals in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Once sent for treatment outside the Gaza Strip, patients encounter Israel’s narrow medical criteria and impossible bureaucratic hurdles for receiving an exit permit.

Patients are issued one-time medical exit permits valid for only one day. While Israeli policy technically allows for long-term permits, this option is rarely exercised. These restrictions are particularly dangerous for cancer patients, for whom any interruption of the treatment sequence could prove fatal.

Many Palestinian patients contact us every month, even multiple times in one month, following complications due to the one-time permit limitation.

Key figures:

• In 2021, 180 Palestinian patients requested PHRI’s assistance after they could not obtain exit permits, over 50% of whom were residents of the Gaza Strip. 77 of the patients (41%) required life-saving cancer treatments outside their areas of residence, 70 of whom were cancer patients living in the Gaza Strip.
• In the first half of 2022, 59 of the assistance requests (40%) managed by PHRI’s OPT department came from cancer patients whose exit Israel delayed, 58 of whom were residents of Gaza.

Such is the case of 22-year-old Gaza resident Iman. Diagnosed with ependymoma, a rare type of brain cancer, Iman requires continuous health monitoring in addition to chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Since 2020, the OPT department has provided Iman with legal assistance to fight ongoing treatment interruptions and delays. Iman’s permit requests are routinely rejected despite her severe condition, forcing her to reapply repeatedly.

As long as Israel continues controlling all aspects of life in the OPT and maintains its siege on Gaza, it remains responsible for allowing unobstructed access to medical care and life-saving treatment. At the very least, Israel must issue long-term permits for cancer patients to attend hospital appointments as often as needed and as scheduled by their physicians.