Mona thought it was the exhaustion that had been making her body feel strange.
But as the sound of bombings echoed through her Gaza City home after violent conflict erupted there in October 2023, the Palestinian mother decided to see a doctor, just in case. She had to stay healthy, after all: she had three daughters to protect from the ever-present dangers of life in Gaza.
“The pain was different,” she tells The Progressive.
After subsequent tests at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, and an agonizing wait, Mona—whose full name has been withheld for security reasons—learned she had a tumor growing in her left breast. Her cancer diagnosis came during the midst of Israel’s ongoing decimation of hospitals in Gaza. With Israel’s blockage of medical aid into the region causing medical supplies to run out, and long wait lists for any type of evacuation out of Gaza, Mona had little choice but to wait for surgery, eventually undergoing a full mastectomy. But even after having the tumor removed, her ordeal was far from over.
“I survived the surgery, thanks to God,” she says, “but I returned immediately to the suffering of war, hunger, and displacement—with no medicine, no follow-up, and no care.”
Mona’s situation is far from unusual—a 2020 study of U.S. breast cancer patients found that nearly half experienced some kind of complication following mastectomies, and in Gaza, where medical resources are limited and facilities are often unsanitary or under-equipped, even minor complications run the risk of becoming life-threatening.
After two years of genocide, the circumstances in Gaza shifted again on October 8, 2025, when the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas marked the tentative promise of an end to widespread death and suffering in the area. When the ceasefire news broke, jubilant scenes of celebration spread across Gaza, alongside trepidation over whether the peace would hold and where to even begin with reconstruction. But in spite of the agreement, Israel has continued to bomb Gaza and block humanitarian convoys from entering the enclave, causing severe aid shortages. Meanwhile, people with cancer and survivors in the area continue to face a war within their own bodies.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated in July 2025 that 11,000 Palestinians require treatment for cancer, and thousands more have likely gone undiagnosed since the beginning of Israel’s siege two years ago. In addition to chemotherapy, which those with active cancer need to prevent the disease from growing and spreading, some cancer survivors also require life-saving medication such as hormonal therapy or maintenance therapy to help prevent the cancer’s return.
But throughout the genocide, patients have struggled to access these crucial treatments and monitoring protocols. In March 2025, Israel destroyed the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, Gaza’s only oncology-specific hospital that treated cancer patients. Many cancer patients or survivors have missed at least two years of medical treatment or follow-up care, with potentially devastating consequences.
“If a woman presents now after two years with a massive [breast cancer] lump, obviously she will need urgent treatment,” Dr. Shaymaa AlWaheidi, a Palestinian cancer researcher at King’s College London, tells The Progressive. Now, she says, “the infrastructure will not be there to do the surgery.”
Even if Israel were to become more compliant with the terms of the ceasefire, it’s unlikely that many cancer treatment options will return to Gaza any time soon given the vast destruction of its health care infrastructure. And Gaza’s cancer patients don’t have the luxury of time. “We’re not talking about something that can wait until we build the infrastructure,” Shaymaa says. “They need immediate help.”
For those facing displacement in the area, attending to basic health needs can be tremendously difficult as their material conditions deteriorate. “They won’t be thinking about the treatments or diagnosis they missed,” AlWaheidi says. “They’re now thinking about finding a home.”
AlWaheidi also notes that many Palestinians have lost access to their vital medical documents amid widespread displacement and destruction. Mona is among those who have lost medical documents, alongside everything else. “We have nothing—no clothes, no furniture, no medical reports, nothing,” she says. “Everything I owned, including my daughters’ belongings, lies under the rubble.”
What’s more, the loss of medical records makes it difficult for clinicians to reestablish contact with patients. AlWaheidi, who previously collected data on breast cancer diagnoses as part of her research and also consulted Gaza’s cancer facilities on improving care, says the cancer registry she previously worked with at the Palestinian Centre for Statistics and Information is gone. Hospitals also collected paper-based records on cancer treatment, but with 94 percent of facilities destroyed or damaged by Israel, a lot of paperwork is believed to be permanently lost. “I don’t even know where to begin,” AlWaheidi says.
For many people living with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses in Gaza, medical evacuation feels like the last remaining hope, but even those who are eligible face barriers to securing clearance. The latest World Health Organization figures show that roughly 15,600 Palestinians are still waiting for urgent evacuation from the Gaza Strip, including trauma victims and people with non-communicable diseases such as cancer. The process requires medical referrals, approvals from the Referral Committee, coordination with host countries, and security clearance from Israeli authorities before evacuees are allowed to leave Gaza. As the World Health Organization attempts to ease this evacuation backlog amid ongoing Israeli restrictions and delays, more cancer cases will likely emerge.
Rasha, a forty-five-year-old teacher from Gaza who also asked that her full name be withheld for safety reasons, thought the biggest hurdle of her breast cancer was over four years ago. But the little pills prescribed just after her surgery to prevent the disease from returning ran out after 2023, as did most medications in the Gaza Strip. Access to hormonal therapy is often vital for women who have undergone surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy in treating breast cancer, and studies show women who discontinue recommended treatment before the end of the standard five-year period face twice the risk of the disease returning. “Those small pills became my lifeline,” Rasha tells The Progressive. “The war has stolen even that.”
Talha Balousha, a forty-two-year-old pharmacist who has worked with cancer patients since 2008, says that about 80 percent of cancer medications are currently in shortage. “The Israeli occupation imposes severe restrictions on the entry of medicines and medical equipment used for diagnosing and treating cancer,” Balousha says, “forcing us to modify other devices for purposes they were never designed for.”
Cancer survivors in Gaza, AlWaheidi says, now live with the psychological toll of “[suspecting] that the cancer is back, without knowing whether it’s back or not.”
Rasha, who has been forced to flee bombing alongside her family on several occasions and has no home to return to, is no stranger to this feeling. “I wake up and touch my chest, terrified that the cancer will come back,” she says. “I feel like I am walking toward death with no shield, no medicine, and no one to care.”
After more than two years of bloodshed in Gaza, embracing the possibility of a more stable future means acknowledging the time lost—and, for those living with cancer, facing the terrible possibility of the disease’s recurrence or progression. “All we ask is to live with dignity,” Mona says. “To protect our children from hunger and fear, and to have the chance to complete our treatment like any other woman in the world.”