Trump embraces Biden effort to evacuate Palestinian children with cancer from Gaza
A rare joint effort launched by the Biden administration and embraced by the Trump White House brought two Palestinian children with cancer from Gaza to the U.S. for treatment this week, multiple sources tell NBC News.
They are among 240 Palestinian children with cancer who have been evacuated from Gaza since the war began so they can get chemotherapy, blood transfusions and other treatments impossible to obtain in the war zone.
But the resumption of fighting threatens to slow these evacuations, with at least six more children diagnosed with cancer waiting to be extricated from Gaza for desperately needed treatment.
On Wednesday, two Palestinian girls with cancer, 17-year-old Nesma and 12-year-old Leen, who asked that their last names not be disclosed for privacy reasons, finally made it to the U.S. treatment. But at least six other Palestinian children with cancer remain trapped in Gaza as fighting intensifies.
In a rare example of cooperation between members of the Biden and Trump administrations, officials from both have pushed their counterparts in Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other countries to help get the children and their parents or guardians security clearances so they can be evacuated for life-saving treatment.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, at least 12 young Palestinian cancer patients who had been approved to leave have died while waiting because of delays and red tape.
The process, which has played out in fits and starts, has been both fraught and frustrating, according to former Biden White House chief of staff, Jeff Zients.
“We pushed and pushed and pushed and thought we were making progress, and then would be blocked,” he told NBC News.
Modeled after an operation by the Biden administration, U.S. officials and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that evacuated 1,700 pediatric cancer patients from Ukraine, the Gaza effort proved far more complicated.
While the war in Ukraine has a clear front line, Israel’s unpredictable urban fighting with Hamas in Gaza complicated the rescue effort. For security and health reasons, many of the evacuations took place one patient at a time in ambulances forced to navigate bombed out roads.
The effort reached a low point in the spring of 2024. On May 6, 4-year-old cancer patient Nabil Kiheil was cleared to leave the next day by Israeli officials. But Israel’s forces invaded the Rafah area and closed the border overnight, and Nabil and his mother had to evacuate to a safer zone in the north.
Forced to wait nearly a month for a crossing from Gaza to Israel to open, Nabil was later evacuated through the Kerem Shalom crossing through Israel to a hospital in East Jerusalem.
Doctors there found that Nabil’s condition had deteriorated, that he had developed sepsis and his organs had begun to fail. Nabil died in East Jerusalem of cardiac arrest less than a week after his fifth birthday.
Nabil’s death motivated Biden administration officials and doctors from St. Jude to push harder for evacuations, people involved in the operation said. From June to November 2024, 46 Palestinian children with cancer got out of Gaza and received treatment in Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Italy and Spain.
But in December 2024 and January 2025, 20 children were then denied visas to leave after Israeli officials began questioning whether caregivers of the sick children had ties to Hamas.
September was the worst month in Gaza for relief efforts in all of 2024, with humanitarian assistance levels dropping to less than half of those in the spring. By October, the humanitarian situation in Gaza had grown so dire that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a letter to their Israeli counterparts demanding that the Israeli government take steps to reverse the trajectory on the ground within 30 days to avoid restrictions on U.S. military aid to Israel, required under U.S. law.
For several months, ceasefire talks were frozen as Biden administration officials repeated the same talking points, of “we’re close,” and “we’re getting closer,” while acknowledging that the most difficult sticking points were often left for the end.
After Trump won the election in November, incoming Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got involved. Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, he appealed to the president-elect to help the pediatric cancer patients. Trump assigned the task to his special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff.
“It’s so worthy,” Witkoff told NBC News in an interview Thursday. “No matter what side of the battle lines you’re on here, these are young kids and they needed to get proper care.”
The arrival of Nesma and Leen, the first pediatric cancer patients from Gaza to arrive in the U.S. for treatment, raised hopes of further evacuations. The two teens landed at Washington Dulles International Airport on Thursday on a humanitarian flight organized by St. Jude and paid for by Pfizer, whose CEO Albert Bourla has provided charter passage for cancer patients.
Asked by NBC News if she’s relieved her daughter made it to the U.S., Nesma’s mother, Mirvat, said before leaving Dulles, “I’m happy for her.”
They were then rushed off to the National Institutes of Health, where Nesma will be treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
