Jordan on Tuesday evacuated the first group of Palestinian children in need of medical treatment from the war-battered Gaza Strip under a plan the king presented to US President Donald Trump last month.
Images aired by state TV channel Al-Mamlaka showed Jordanian military helicopters arriving at a military airport in Amman carrying four injured children and their families.
The children, two of them amputees, were taken to hospital upon arrival.
Government spokesman Mohammad Momani told a news conference that the first group “of the Gazan children suffering various illnesses began arriving.”
Momani said it was the start of the “implementation of the initiative that the king spoke about in Washington.”
In his White House visit last month, King Abdullah II told Trump: “One of the things that we can do right away is take 2,000 children, cancer children who are in a very ill state. That is possible.”
Later on Tuesday, another 29 children accompanied by 44 adults were brought into Jordan by land, a military spokesman said.
Ambulances carrying them entered via the King Hussein Bridge crossing, also known as Allenby Bridge crossing, between the Israeli-controlled West Bank and Jordan.
Ahmad Shehada, 13, told AFP he was eager to “get my life back” after a serious injury.
The boy, whose father and other relatives died in the war sparked by the Hamas-led terror onslaught on October 7, 2023,, said he had gone to get water when “a helicopter dropped a strange object, and it exploded on us.”
Shehada lost an arm and “traveled to Jordan to have a (prosthetic) limb fitted,” he said.
The war has killed over 48,000 people in Gaza and left more than 100,000 wounded, according to unverified figures from the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry, which do not differentiate between fighters and non-combatants.
Israel says it has killed some 20,000 combatants in battle as of January and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel on October 7, during which some 1,200 people — mostly civilians — were killed and 251 abducted to Gaza.
Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.
Israel’s toll in the ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza and in military operations along the border with the Strip stands at 410. The toll includes a police officer killed in a hostage rescue mission and two Defense Ministry civilian contractors.