As Israel blocks PA funding, the West Bank’s healthcare system is failing
Al Jazeera · LC · trust 36/100
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x whatsapp-stroke copylink google Add Al Jazeera on Google info Beit Jala is one of many health centres in the occupied West Bank affected by the Palestinian Authority's funding crisis [Al Jazeera] By Al Jazeera Staff Published On 17 Oct 2026 17 Oct 2026 Beit Jala, occupied West Bank – Khaldoun Atwan starts each day in the oncology ward at Beit Jala Government Hospital, not knowing what barriers will come his way.
The Nabi Yunis checkpoint in Halhul seems to be “always closed”, so the head of the daytime oncology unit at the hospital leaves his car and finishes the commute from Hebron by taxi.
“More than once, by God, I found the mirror broken. I found the wiper broken,” he said about his journey through an area where settlers are now active.
Traversing a dizzying array of gates and checkpoints opening or closing at will, he does not know whether he will reach the hospital, whether his patients will, or whether the drugs they need will be on the shelf when they do.
Beit Jala is the only government hospital in Bethlehem governorate, home to some 320,000 people. Inside his tiny, spartan office, Atwan is struggling to keep up with his cancer patients who have regressed because they missed crucial appointments or essential drugs needed for their chemotherapy treatment.
Not even during the second Intifada, he recalls, was drug supply an issue. Now, it’s inescapable.
“Everything’s short … whatever’s available we give,” he said. “It’s a disaster.”
The Palestinian Authority (PA)’s finances have collapsed over the last three years due to a reduction in international aid and disruptions in Israel’s transfers of tax receipts. Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank since October 2023, including widespread road closures, checkpoints and a series of settler pogroms against Palestinian communities, have also impacted the economy.
As a result, the occupied West Bank’s healthcare system is rapidly deteriorating, with staff receiving just half their salaries, while the PA can’t pay for essential medications.
Alongside others nervously pacing in the courtyard, an older cancer patient from a village in Bethlehem governorate stood at the entrance of the hospital, weighing with his son what to do. “Every month they do their best, the doctors and the cleaning staff, but they aren’t provided with anything,” he said.
Ministry clinics are now operating part-time, with doctors seeing well more than 100 patients a day when they are. Now, even a doctor’s visit is rushed and unaffordable: “If we want to go to the doctor for a checkup, we need 200 shekels [$65],” said an older cancer patient.
“It’s not a story of there being no staff,” said Iyad Dari, the attending physician at the dialysis unit at Beit Jala. Getting paid only half their salaries, “the government employee is working just two or three days a week, because he hasn’t got enough to come in for his full hours,” he added. As a result, the hospital ends up covering emergency cases only.
“At first, [patients] were [angry]. But now everyone understands: Everyone’s suffering,” Dari said.
The medical supplies crisis in Beit Jala and across the West Bank is the result of Israel’s withholding of tax revenues earmarked for the PA, an action spearheaded by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
“This crisis is very predictable, and we saw it coming 100 percent,” said Milena Ansari of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Even before the genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023, Israel was periodically withholding tax revenues, endangering the Ministry of Health’s coffers, Milena said.
According to Yosef Ojra, an internal medicine specialist at Beit Jala, the withheld revenues have depleted the Health Ministry’s funds to pay medical suppliers, who are now withholding their services. The ongoing borrowing of supplies between the public and private arms of healthcare has greatly strained private clinics, pharmacies and hospitals.
Hisham Amle, an oncologist at the hospital, said shortages are “an old problem, not a new one”, but that about 90 percent of important items – for chemotherapy, above all – used to be there. Now, even immunotherapies and biologics are missing, and cancer treatment runs on an unbroken chain. “If the patient misses a session or two, he’s lost all the treatment before it,” he said.
“When I first took over the department, the drugs were available,” said Atwan, the lead oncology nurse. He then began to list all the crucial drugs he was now missing for his patients. “There’s not one single complete protocol I’ve got.”
Khuloud Dweib, the hospital’s director of pharmacy, said the ministry recently managed to obtain eight previously missing oncology drugs and four biologics. This should be enough for between a month and a half and two months. But many other drugs are still out of stock, she said.
Unlike in Gaza, Israel is not blocking medicines from entering the West Bank, Ansari noted. The problem is “strictly” that the PA has no money to buy them. But “Israel has the primary legal obligation as an occupying power,” she notes, to ensure adequate medical care and access to occupied populations.
For all of the southern West Bank, Beit Jala’s hospital is the only public option available for cancer and dialysis treatment, with patients coming from Bethlehem and Hebron governorates, parts of occupied East Jerusalem and sometimes Jericho.
But as Israeli checkpoints…
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