Charting a therapeutic geography of Gazan pediatric oncology in the aftermath of the “October War.”

Abstract (English)

“Our destiny is ambiguous.” These haunting words—spoken by a mother accompanying her cancer-stricken child from a Gaza under rubble to the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman—echo through the shattered therapeutic horizons of Palestinian pediatric oncology patients and their care networks (Boushnak and Vinograd 2024). In the wake of Israel’s intensified assault on Gaza since late 2023, care-seeking has been reinforced as an existential and imaginative endeavor, as families navigate permit regimes, border closures, enduring poverty, and severed access to essential medical facilities in pursuit of life-sustaining treatment. Gaza’s fragile oncology networks have always required uncertain, protracted journeys abroad, and recent acute militarization has collapsed or reconfigured these tenuous pathways. Through digital review of health reports and crowdfunding campaigns, and interviews with Gazans seeking pediatric oncology care, this paper charts the logistical strategies and affective horizons of Gazan families whose pursuit of care is entangled with loss, displacement, and unpredictability. Therapeutic geographies of Gazan pediatric oncology are constituted through shifting hermeneutics of care: improvisational travel and fragmented infrastructures in exile or suspension. In this context, seeking treatment becomes a form of horizoning—a future-oriented practice shaped by grief, love, and the ghosts of institutional support. By charting the reconfiguration of treatment locations, funding sources, and the fractured capacities to cross borders, this paper considers the embodied horizons of Gazan pediatric patients and their caregivers as it asks: how are resistance, relationality, and imaginative adaptation forged in care landscapes negotiating hope and death?