Following Royal directives, the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army (JAF), in cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Ministry of Health, evacuates on Tuesday 29 children from the Gaza Strip to Jordan for medical treatment. Jordan News Agency (Petra)
Images aired by state TV channel Al-Mamlaka showed Jordanian military helicopters arriving at a military airport in Amman carrying four injured children and their families.
The children, two of them amputees, were taken to hospital upon arrival.
Government spokesman Mohammad Momani told a news conference that the first group "of the Gazan children suffering various illnesses began arriving".
Momani said it was the start of the "implementation of the initiative that the king spoke about in Washington".
In his White House visit last month, King Abdullah II told Trump: "One of the things that we can do right away is take 2,000 children, cancer children who are in a very ill state. That is possible."
Later on Tuesday, another 29 children accompanied by 44 adults were brought into Jordan by land, a military spokesman said.
Ambulances carrying them entered via the King Hussein Bridge crossing, also known as Allenby Bridge crossing, between the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Jordan.
Ahmad Shehada, 13, told AFP he was eager to "get my life back" after a serious injury.
The boy, whose father and other relatives died in the war, said he had gone to get water when "a helicopter dropped a strange object, and it exploded on us".
Shehada lost an arm and "travelled to Jordan to have a (prosthetic) limb fitted", he said.
Since Oct.7, 2023, Israel’s war on Gaza resulted in a mass genocide, leaving over 160,000 Palestinians dead or wounded, mostly women and children, and over 14,000 missing.
* This story was edited by Ahram Online.
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