Jordan, UAE to Set Up Gaza Field Hospitals After Six Weeks of War

Latest Developments

Jordan and the United Arab Emirates are setting up the first field hospitals in the southern Gaza Strip to help wounded and sick Palestinians – those injured by the Hamas-Israel war or displaced from Gaza’s six hospitals given worsening conditions and their use by Hamas terrorists. Forty trucks of equipment and 180 doctors and nurses sent from Jordan began entering southern Gaza through neighboring Egypt on November 20 and are expected to set up a field hospital in Khan Younis within 48 hours.

Jordanian Crown Prince Hussein was in Egypt’s El-Arish to oversee the arrival and dispatch of the airlifted goods and staff. Jordan has previously air-dropped supplies to a hospital it sponsors in Gaza City and is separately setting up a field hospital in the West Bank city of Nablus — a signal that it wants to help provide treatment for Gazan casualties within Palestinian territory, rather than see them travel abroad.

Gaza officials also said they would host an Emirati delegation sent to scout out locations for the field hospital being sponsored by Abu Dhabi, which has separately flown in a small number of wounded Palestinian children for treatment.

Israel has earmarked Mawasi, a barren area on the southwest Gazan coast, as a safe zone for Palestinian war refugees. It has also invited foreign powers to set up field hospitals there and encouraged Cairo to allow more casualties out through the Egyptian Sinai.

Expert Analysis

“The fact that so far only two Arab countries have mobilized medical assistance, in the seventh week of a war whose ravages they have unfairly blamed on Israel, is regrettable and telling. Compare this to the alacrity with which Israel sends field hospitals, often within mere days, to disaster zones the world over — most recently in the wake of the February earthquake in Turkey, a country that has proven especially vociferous about the Gaza war and its support for Hamas.” — Mark Dubowitz, FDD CEO

“That Jordan has chosen Khan Younis as the site of its field hospital may point to an attempt by Amman to complicate any significant southward expansion of Israel’s Gaza offensive. Khan Younis has major Hamas targets. We must hope that the Jordanians are closely coordinating their medical deployment with Israel — and are not setting up their doctors, nurses, and future Palestinian patients to be human shields for Hamas.” — Joe Truzman, Research Analyst at FDD’s Long War Journal

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