Israel Says a Gaza Boy's Medical Exit Was Never Even Requested

COGAT, the Israeli defence ministry body that coordinates civilian matters with the Palestinian territories, rejected a claim by Hamas that a seven-year-old boy named Anwar Al-Ashi had died because Israel refused to let him leave Gaza for medical treatment. "Contrary to claims, Anwar's information was never submitted to Israel for exit. Never," the agency said.

The statement followed a Hamas social media post carrying a photograph of a healthy-looking boy with a caption saying he had died of kidney failure while waiting for Israel to approve urgent medical treatment abroad. "Once again, Hamas is using photos of sick children to push the narrative that suits them and blame Israel," COGAT said. The agency added that Israel works with the international community to facilitate the exit of patients and their companions for treatment in third countries, and that the scale of such exits depends entirely on a third country submitting a request and agreeing to receive the people leaving Gaza.

What COGAT is, and what it can and cannot decide

The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories is a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defence, established in 1967, headed by a major general and responsible for civilian policy in the West Bank and for logistical coordination with the Gaza Strip, according to reference accounts of the body. It is the office through which humanitarian arrangements, infrastructure projects and coordination with international organisations pass. It is also, inevitably, a party to the conflict it administers, and its statements are contested.

How a patient actually gets out of Gaza

COGAT's argument turns on a procedural point that is genuinely central to the medical evacuation system: no single authority can simply release a patient. The Times of Israel reported in August 2025 that the World Health Organization had replaced the Palestinian Authority's Civil Affairs Committee as the intermediary between Gaza's health ministry and Israel, compiling and submitting patient lists, while COGAT carries out security vetting and clearance and evacuations run through the Kerem Shalom crossing after the closure of Rafah.

The bottleneck the same report identified was not only Israeli approval but the supply of receiving countries. A third state must agree to fund treatment and to host the patient and companions, in many cases indefinitely. As of that reporting, Egypt had received by far the most patients (3,995), followed by the United Arab Emirates with 1,387, Qatar with 970 and Turkey with 437. Against that, the WHO put the number of patients urgently needing to leave Gaza at around 14,800, meaning the monthly outflow amounted to a small fraction of the need, and some patients had waited more than eighteen months.

Two claims that do not directly meet

It is worth being precise about what COGAT did and did not assert. It did not dispute that the boy was ill or that he died. Its claim was narrower and specific: that his details were never submitted to Israel, so no Israeli refusal could have occurred. That is a claim about paperwork, and the paperwork in question sits with the WHO and Gaza's health authorities as much as with Israel.

Neither the original statement nor the Hamas post it answered offers a way for a reader to verify which of the two accounts is correct. Both are statements by parties to the war about the death of a child.

The exchange took place during the ceasefire that began in October 2025, a truce that was holding on paper while remaining contested on the ground: reviewing Israeli military figures, FDD's Long War Journal reported on 20 February 2026 that the IDF had counted 113 violations of the agreement since it took effect. Information warfare has run alongside that, on both sides.

What is still unclear

COGAT did not say whether it had checked its records against the WHO's submitted lists, or whether a request in the boy's name had been lodged with any body other than Israel. It gave no figures for how many exit requests it had approved or refused in the relevant period, and no timeline. The original account did not identify who in Hamas made the claim, and did not report any response from the boy's family or from the World Health Organization.