Gaza Dialysis Patients Say Cuts to Machine Hours and Missing Medicines Are Killing Them Slowly

Hatem Jadallah, 44, spent two weeks this month getting half the dialysis treatment his body needs. His sessions at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis were cut from four hours to two, and from three times a week to two, before service partly resumed days ago.

He told The New Arab the cuts happen every few months, tied to shortages of the substances that keep dialysis machines running. He held up a bag of empty medicine packets he cannot refill anywhere in Gaza, government or private pharmacy.

Jadallah developed kidney atrophy before the war and managed it through diet and medication. He lost access to both once Israel's assault on Gaza began, and started dialysis in August 2024. He now lives in a tent he built from wood and nylon in al-Mawasi, after his family's most recent displacement in May 2025.

His wife, Hala, a social studies graduate, has offered him one of her kidneys. There is no way to test compatibility or perform transplant surgery in Gaza. She told The New Arab her husband has slipped into coma more than once during the war and that his blood count once dropped to five.

A missing hormone, a year of decline

At the same hospital, 54-year-old Eman Abu Hattab described the worst stretch of dialysis treatment she has experienced since starting in 2018. Her haemoglobin fell to 4.9 during a session observed by The New Arab, requiring blood transfusions before she could tolerate treatment at all.

Abu Hattab said the hormone used to maintain haemoglobin levels has not entered Gaza for roughly a year, a restriction she attributes to Israel. The New Arab was not able to independently verify the specific import decision or its timeline, and Occupation Watch has not obtained separate confirmation from hospital records or aid agencies. The claim is consistent, however, with well-documented restrictions Israel maintains over what medical goods cross into Gaza.

Abu Hattab's husband was killed in an Israeli strike on 27 December 2023. She has been displaced repeatedly since and now lives beneath a partially destroyed building. She sold her gold to pay for a tent.

Toxins that do not leave the body

Both patients described the same underlying danger: when dialysis hours shrink, toxins that the machine is meant to filter out stay in the bloodstream. Abu Hattab called it "a gradual destruction." Jadallah has also lost access to filtered water, which helps preserve remaining kidney function, and has at times drunk the same untreated water as his children.

None of these accounts have been independently verified through hospital admission logs or supply-chain data made public by health authorities in Gaza. They come from named patients, a treating nurse, and family members speaking directly to The New Arab, describing conditions inside one of the territory's few functioning dialysis wards.

What is not in dispute is the structural fact underlying their testimony. Israel controls every crossing into Gaza and determines, in practice, what medical supplies, spare parts and pharmaceuticals reach hospitals like Nasser Medical Complex. For dialysis patients whose survival depends on machines running for a fixed number of hours each week, that control is not abstract policy. It is measured in the two hours a session gets cut, and in the blood counts that keep falling.