With a sulky expression on his face, Ali sat up abruptly on his bed in the pediatric oncology ward at Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, threatening to pull out his drip. "I want to go home," the 8-year-old said with difficulty. The young patient is from Gaza, where he left his two brothers, his sister and his father, now being bombed by Israel. After the Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,400 people, the Palestinian enclave is under siege: No one can enter. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 9,000 Gazans have been killed since the start of the war – over 3,700 of them minors.

Ali left Gaza on September 13, a few days after being diagnosed with leukemia. No hospital in the enclave, which has been under Israeli blockade since 2007, can treat this type of cancer. His mother, Oum Ali al-Jenineh, obtained a permit to accompany him to Jerusalem – a prerequisite that only half of all accompanying persons manage to obtain. After October 7, Ali and his mother found themselves stranded in the Holy City, whose Palestinian section is illegally annexed by Israel. "I'm mentally exhausted, between my son's illness and now the war," said the 30-year-old. Her husband remains in their apartment in Gaza City, with another son and daughter.

She entrusted her youngest, who is not even 2, to her sister, who fled to the south of the enclave after the Israeli army's call to evacuate the north of the Palestinian territory. "I miss him all the time," she explained in a monotone voice, her frail figure curled up on the corner of her son's hospital bed. "I want to hug him and kiss him. Ali is the biggest. The others are small. They need me. There's no substitute for a mother's arms. There's no internet, no electricity. I don't get photos of them anymore, so I look at the ones we took together. I talk to them as if they were with me." On the weekend of October 28 and 29, she broke down. For almost two days, communications with Gaza were cut off. "I thought the worst: that they were dead," she murmured.

'The smallest one doesn't recognize me'

For more than 45 days, she has been cloistered in the small room of this early 20^th-century hospital. "I haven't set foot outside; I barely go to the cafeteria," she said. On October 7, the permits of 49 patients and 51 accompanying persons from Gaza at Augusta Victoria and those of 53 patients and 40 accompanying persons at Makassed, the other Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem that receives Gazans, were revoked. Ten days later, an arrangement was reached and their permits are now renewed on a weekly basis. But "these permits are only valid from the hospital to the hotel and do not authorize travel in Jerusalem or elsewhere," explained a spokesperson for the NGO Physicians for Human Rights Israel. On November 2, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli security forces had raided the Al-Makassed hospital and arrested several patients.

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