Jinin Rummaneh
+972 Magazine / May 14, 2026
With all machines destroyed or rendered useless by Israel’s siege, we cannot diagnose our patients, forced instead to practice a desperate form of triage.
For months, 12-year-old Palestinian Jana al-Hajj has been slowly losing movement in her limbs. First, she found herself no longer able to use one of her legs. Then, the paralysis crept into her other leg, and is now beginning to spread into her arms. “I can no longer bear to see my daughter wasting away like this,” her mother, Fedaa Al-Hajj told +972 Magazine from their home in Gaza’s Nuseirat camp, her voice breaking after months of hospital visits and sleepless nights.
Jana has been suffering since the start of the war in October 2023, when her family was displaced to Deir al-Balah before eventually returning home. Yet in these two and a half years, no doctor in Gaza has been able to diagnose her condition, as the Strip lacks the technology that would deliver an explanation. “My heart aches every single time I look at her,” Fedaa said. “She is deteriorating before my eyes, and the doctors are standing there, handcuffed by a lack of technology.”
At the end of 2023, doctors told the family that an urgent MRI scan was essential to determine the cause of Jana’s symptoms and start a treatment plan that could save her from permanent disability. They warned that every additional hour of waiting was critical. Despite receiving an official medical referral in February to seek treatment abroad, Jana’s name has remained on waiting lists, caught in the bureaucratic and physical strangulation of Israel’s permit regime, while Gaza’s healthcare system collapsed under war and siege.
Today, Jana’s world has shrunk to the size of her room. She can no longer walk independently – her father carries her and places her on a simple bicycle he pushes her on to take her to physical therapy appointments. She fiercely refuses to use a wheelchair, clinging instead to the memory of movement and balance.
“I can’t go to school anymore, and I can’t play with my friends like we used to,” Jana whispered, her eyes fixed on a distant point. “Even my prayers — my body can no longer sustain the movements of prostration. I just want to walk normally again.”
Over the course of the genocide, over 1,500 medical staff have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and hundreds of others arrested and held in Israeli prisons. But another, quieter form of destruction has made Gazan hospitals incapable of treating many of their patients: there are still no functioning MRI machines in the Strip, crucial tools for diagnosing hundreds of diseases, from cancers to strokes and epilepsy.
While some machines were simply shattered by direct bombardment, others were rendered unusable by blockade-induced shortages of spare parts and the liquid helium gas required to operate them. Helium is the lifeblood of the MRI, cooling the powerful magnets to near absolute zero; without it, the machine’s magnetic field collapses and the machine can no longer function.
Doctors told +972 Magazine that stories like Jana’s have become increasingly common as their capacity to diagnose patients disappears. “The loss of MRI machines is a catastrophic barrier for both doctors and patients,” said Dr. Mohammed Ibrahim Abu Nada, a consultant in paediatric neurology at the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, Gaza’s only cancer hospital. “As doctors, we are effectively blinded. We cannot accurately diagnose refractory epilepsy, brain inflammations, or the early stages of tumours in children. We are forced to watch them suffer, knowing the tool we need to save them is sitting useless in a room just a few meters away.”
From evidence-based medicine to approximation
Even before October 2023, Gaza’s MRI capacity was already far below international standards. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Strip’s 2.2 million population relied on only seven MRI machines. International medical standards suggest countries should have at least one machine for every 100,000 people, meaning Gaza should have had three times as many scanners as it did before the war.
Most of the machines were located in two public hospitals — Al-Shifa Hospital and the European Hospital — performing over 16,000 scans annually. Despite operating beyond normal working hours to reduce backlogs, the waiting lists were months long. “We were planning to increase the number of machines to 15 in partnership with international NGOs,” Dr. Mohammed Amin Mattar, head of the Radiology Department at Al-Shifa Hospital, recalled. “But the war didn’t just stop those plans — it buried them under the rubble.”
This technological void has reverted the quality of care in Gaza from the era of evidence-based medicine back to clinical approximation and symptomatic treatment. Gaza’s physicians are forced to rely on their own intuition or CT scans, which image cross-sections of the body but cannot provide the soft tissue or neurological detail needed to diagnose complex conditions.
“We do what we can with what we have,” Mattar said. “But what we have is failing our patients. This diagnostic gap has directly led to the loss of countless lives, especially children, because we caught their conditions too late or misidentified them entirely.”
To be sure, this crisis has affected Palestinians of all ages. For 64-year-old Hajja Fadwa Hussein, severe spinal compression has left her in chronic pain and increasingly unable to walk. She previously underwent hip replacement surgery and now suffers from swelling and nerve pain on the opposite side of her body, a constant throb that robs her of sleep.
While she is eager to get treated, surgeons have told her they cannot proceed safely without advanced imaging, and repeated displacement during the war only worsened her condition. Now, the woman who once held her family together — the primary caretaker for her orphaned grandchildren — cannot stand for more than five minutes, even with the support of a walker.
But the lack of MRIs is particularly problematic for children with developmental and neurological disorders. When 14-month-old Masa Khalaf from Gaza City began showing signs of muscle weakness at just four months, doctors suggested waiting until she was six months for a CT scan, at which point she also received a medical evacuation referral.
But as time passed, her condition deteriorated and she began suffering from recurrent lung infections, severe respiratory distress, and violent seizures. The medical consensus became clear: Masa needed an MRI to determine whether the underlying problem originates in her brain or her nervous system.
Masa’s mother, herself struggling with hypertension, thyroid issues, and painful varicose veins, reported the exhaustion of living in the wards of Al-Rantisi Hospital for Children in Gaza City for the past month. “There is no rest and no sleep — the girl is suffering 24 hours a day,” she explained. “Whenever they try to insert a [intravenous] cannula for her, I become distressed and start crying for her because they keep trying for nearly an hour before they can find a vein.”
In the midst of our conversation, she let out a sigh of pure, unfiltered grief that echoed through the cold hospital hallway and left me, as a journalist and a fifth-year medical student, utterly speechless.
The referral trap
For some families, a medical evacuation out of Gaza is their only hope. Yet the system that once provided a limited number of medical referrals to hospitals in Jerusalem, the West Bank, or abroad has become a dead end.
With nearly 20,000 people requiring medical evacuation, and only 12 allowed to leave per day, the criteria for selection are unbelievably stringent. To be prioritized, Israel requires patients to have a definitive diagnostic report. But because obtaining these diagnoses frequently requires MRI imaging unavailable in Gaza, patients in desperate need of the service are pushed to the bottom of the list for travel in a cruel, circular logic.
We medical students at Al-Azhar University are perhaps most acutely aware of this irony. We spend our nights studying the physics of MRI and the intricate details of neuroimaging from world-class textbooks. We memorize the signs of diseases we know we will never see on a screen in our local hospitals. This gap between our education and our practical reality is a source of daily professional heartbreak.
The absence of MRI technology in Gaza is a silent, ongoing execution. Abu Nada insisted that the international community must intervene to supply these machines; otherwise, we medical workers are left simply waiting for these children to die. For Jana, Fadwa, and Masa, the MRI is the difference quite literally between life and death.
Until the technical siege is broken and Gaza’s doctors regain their diagnostic capacities, we will be condemned to practice a desperate form of triage — and to live in a world that has decided some lives are not worth the cost of a basic scan.
In response to +972 Magazine’s request for comment, the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said that Israel “allows and facilitates the entry of medical equipment” into Gaza in cooperation with aid organizations and the international community. It added that there is “no quantitative restriction” on trucks carrying medical supplies and cited the entry of various items, including X-ray and CT machines, oxygen generators, dialysis machines, incubators, hospital beds, and medicines. It did not specifically address the entry of MRI machines, or of the helium and spare parts required to operate them.
Jinin Rummaneh is a fifth-year medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza; she is dedicated to documenting the multifaceted human suffering in the Strip with a primary focus on the debilitating crises within the medical field, bridging her clinical insights with the realities she witnesses daily on the front lines of the healthcare system
