Gaza cancer patient dies in Egypt after months waiting for evacuation

The Independent identified her as Iktimal, who, according to relatives, began feeling unwell in February 2026 and underwent a biopsy around the same time. Her diagnosis of cervical cancer was delayed for more than a month, the paper reported, because Gaza’s histopathology labs were struggling to obtain equipment and essential supplies.

By the time the results arrived, her family says, she was determined but frightened less by the diagnosis itself than by the prospect of not reaching treatment in time. After surgery in April to remove her womb, she recovered slowly and began suffering severe kidney pain. Local hospitals, her relatives told The Independent, could not provide the care she needed.

That is where a private illness runs into a public system. According to the World Health Organisation, none of Gaza’s 36 hospitals is operating at full capacity, and only 19 are functioning partially. The shortages are not abstract: equipment, electricity, fuel and medicines all sit inside the same sentence, and patients sit inside the consequences.

Her family said she applied for medical evacuation in May. Assembling records, scans and test results was itself difficult in a territory battered by war and weak record-keeping. In August, relatives were told her case had been put on hold because two escorts had been requested and only one was allowed, according to the report. Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories disputed that account, telling The Independent that the claim was false and that patient approval is independent of approval for an accompanying person, meaning she could have departed earlier.

COGAT also said applications are approved within days rather than weeks and cited a 98 per cent approval rate. But the family’s account of her final stretch is brutally plain. By the time she was able to travel to Egypt, they said, her condition had become severely critical. Summer, her relative, said she was in severe pain and was relying on morphine shots that were not always available when needed.

Two weeks later, she died in Egypt. Her last words to her family, according to The Independent, were: “I wish I stayed among you.”

On Thursday, Gaza’s health ministry said around 21,000 people were still awaiting medical evacuation. In Iktimal’s case, the argument over what caused which delay remains contested. What is not contested is that she left Gaza only near the end of her life, and died away from the home where, her family recalled, she was the one always cooking and making people feel welcome.