The New Humanitarian: Forgotten Palestinians Trapped in Egypt’s Medical Limbo Need Global Support

By Jomana Abunahla | September 4, 2025

This story was originally published by The New Humanitarian.

Since October 2023, Egypt has accepted thousands of Palestinian medical patients and displaced persons. But its healthcare system is under severe strain, hospitals lack the capacity to treat complex cases like cancer, and international evacuations to other countries have slowed to a halt. Initial pledges by Türkiye and the UAE to take in Palestinian cancer patients have largely gone unfulfilled, leaving those evacuated to Egypt without the care they were promised.

I know this because my mother, who has been battling cancer, is one of those patients. As she said: “We are left alone and dumped here, and no one cares.”

Palestinians in Egypt like my mother have not been formally recognised as refugees or asylum seekers. Almost all of them – around 100,000 displaced people who managed to leave Gaza and around 7,600 medical evacuees – were given short-term tourist visas. Once these expired after 45 days, they became undocumented, making it difficult for them to work and access services.

UNRWA, the UN’s agency for Palestine refugees, does not have a mandate to operate in Egypt; and UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, is prohibited from registering people.

The international community cannot continue to stand by as thousands of Palestinians suffer in silence. For Egypt, the burden of managing this crisis alone is unsustainable. For displaced Palestinians like my mother, the lack of legal recognition, medical care, and basic dignity is a daily reminder of the world’s indifference.

We need to act – not tomorrow, but now. The world is morally obligated to address this humanitarian crisis, not just with statements, but with real solutions rooted in dignity and justice.

The situation for medical evacuees in Egypt

In early 2024, my mother was one of the early medical evacuees from Gaza to Egypt. Like many, we thought she had escaped death, and finally she would be able to receive the cancer and cardiac care she had been denied after the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital – Gaza’s only cancer hospital – was severely damaged and put out of service at the end of October 2023 (Israel then razed the hospital building to the ground in March 2025).

But for six months, she was trapped in a system that treated her survival as a burden, not a right. No medical follow-up. No psychological care. No dignity.

My mother was among the very few who managed to escape the most humiliating housing conditions imaginable. For six months, she was confined to a two-bedroom apartment in Cairo, sharing it with the displaced family of another cancer patient. Eight people were crammed into the small apartment. There was no privacy, no quiet, no reprieve for someone battling cancer and heart complications. Before that, she spent three months in a hospital that had no doctors and few nurses.

When she requested the ministry in charge of accommodations for medical evacuees to leave and rent a safer, quieter place, she was threatened: If she left, she would no longer be on the waiting list for treatment. Her suffering was conditional. Her body, it seemed, belonged to bureaucracy.

Eventually, after she chose to leave, the Palestinian embassy agreed to support her treatment at a different hospital, but only after she had been made to feel disposable. And while her case was treated as an exception, many others remain trapped in these prison-like shelters, threatened into silence, and treated not as survivors of war but as burdens to be managed.

The experience of Shaimaa, a 27-year-old woman and friend of mine, provides another example. Shaimaa’s two brothers, Ihab and Nasser, were both gravely injured in an Israeli airstrike that destroyed their home in Rafah in February 2024. Egypt was their only option for emergency evacuation, and Shaimaa and her mother were able to accompany them when they left. But what awaited them was not safety; it was fragmentation.

Shaimaa and her brother Ihab were sent to the temporary floating hospital in al-Arish in the northern Sinai peninsula that was set up to treat medical evacuees. Their mother and her other brother Nasser were sent to Port Said, hundreds of miles away. Decisions made by unknown people in some invisible bureaucracy split them up, while the rest of their family remained in Gaza.

Her brother Ihab needed urgent surgery to remove shrapnel embedded in his leg, but the hospital was ill-equipped. Without proper imaging or surgical capacity, the doctor told them plainly: “This is a surgery on hope alone.”

In the end, Ihab was discharged without treatment. Shaimaa’s repeated requests to be moved to the same hospital as her mother and brother were denied without explanation. The physical separation became yet another wound in a family already shattered by war.

Denied legal status, Shaimaa could not work. Aid organisations refused her food boxes that were only distributed to the heads of households. Her mother remained in hospital indefinitely, making it impossible to register for support. Alone in a foreign country, she struggled to survive. She is still looking for a job, and one of her brothers who remained in Gaza has since been killed in an Israeli airstrike. “In Gaza, even during the worst of it, we had each other,” she said. “Here, I am completely alone.”

The gaps in global responsibility

To be clear, efforts have been made to care for evacuees from Gaza. The Egyptian Red Crescent has coordinated much of the emergency response. The Egyptian Ministry of Social Solidarity has opened public shelters and provided basic support. The Palestinian embassy has overseen some patient aid. But these efforts are insufficient and inconsistent.

Visits by dignitaries – from UN Secretary-General António Guterres to French President Emmanuel Macron – and distribution of food parcels do not constitute dignity. A few mattresses and a meal do not replace the right to housing, privacy, or medical care.

To give Gazans in Egypt the support and dignity they deserve, Egypt should grant temporary residency permits to Palestinians displaced by war, which will allow them to access healthcare, education, and employment without compromising their right to return to their homeland.

International agencies, regional partners, and governments must collaborate on medical evacuations, family reunification, and aid distribution.

In addition, the international community must expand medical evacuation programmes from Egypt to ensure that cancer patients and those with chronic or complex conditions are transferred to countries equipped to treat them. This should be prioritised and systematically managed.

Shelters for patients and their families in Egypt must meet basic humanitarian standards, with gender-sensitive arrangements, privacy, and access to psychosocial care. No one should have to choose between their health and their dignity.

Since the vast majority of Palestinians who have escaped from Gaza are in Egypt, donor countries should provide targeted funding to support Egypt’s response, including to NGOs and UN agencies capable of delivering essential services and rights-based assistance.

International agencies, regional partners, and governments must collaborate on medical evacuations, family reunification, and aid distribution. Countries like Canada, Belgium, and Malaysia have accepted Palestinian evacuees and should be supported to do more.

The real issue is that most Gazans in Egypt are treated as passive recipients of charity – not as human beings with rights. They are trapped in a system of neglect and silence. And the world is complicit as it watches the suffering of displaced Palestinians from Gaza yet fails to act in any meaningful way.