Gaza: Desperately ill children arrive in Jordan for specialist medical care

Twenty-nine sick children from Gaza have arrived in Jordan for emergency specialist medical care.

They are the first of 2,000 children that the Jordanian government has agreed to take from the war-torn Gaza Strip and include amputees, babies with heart defects and children suffering from shrapnel wounds.

Cancer patients will be evacuated in the coming days.

The transfer was delayed by a number of days but finally went ahead on Tuesday.

A few patients were airlifted from the Gaza border but most made the journey by road, through Israel and to the border with Jordan.

The World Health Organisation estimates around 4,500 children are in need of urgent medical care.

One of the children to be evacuated yesterday, six-month-old Naveen, has a hole in her heart and is dangerously underweight.

“It was difficult in Gaza, there was no treatment I could get for her,” her mother Enas told Sky News.

“She was losing weight. She is now six months old and she hasn’t put on even one kilogram in the last six months. And in the tents my daughter got ill, she is suffering a lot.”

Enas was also with her fifteen-year-old daughter Jenna but left behind many of her family, including twin sons, and travelled with only a few plastic carrier bags of belongings.

Naveen is now in hospital in Amman undergoing tests.

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Jordan has rejected Donald Trump’s plan to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza, but offered to treat these children when King Abdullah met the US president in The White House a few weeks ago.

Jordan insists the children and their guardians will be able to return to Gaza once their treatment is complete, although it’s unclear whether Israel will allow them access, especially with the status of the ceasefire now extremely uncertain.