Hospitals across the occupied West Bank are struggling with severe shortages of staff, medicines and supplies after Israel blocked tax transfers to the Palestinian Authority and reduced international aid.
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01Summary
- 01Beit Jala Government Hospital, the only public hospital for Bethlehem governorate’s 320,000 people, is operating on half salaries for staff and missing most chemotherapy protocols.
- 02Oncologist Hisham Amle said 90 percent of essential cancer drugs used to be available, but now even immunotherapies and biologics are missing.
- 03Israel has withheld tax revenues from the PA since before October 2023, a policy led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, according to Physicians for Human Rights Israel.
- 04Patients face closed checkpoints and detours that turn a 10-shekel journey into one costing more than 100 shekels, and a normal one-and-a-half-hour supply run from Nablus can take 6–10 hours.
- 05The PA’s finances have collapsed due to reduced international aid and disruptions in Israeli tax transfers, worsened by road closures and settler violence since October 2023.
02Why it matters
The failure of the West Bank’s healthcare system endangers hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, particularly those needing cancer and dialysis treatment, who now face missed appointments, unavailable drugs and prohibitive travel costs.
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