Inside the Ramallah hotel housing Gaza’s cancer patients

03/03/2025

Ramallah, occupied West Bank — For more than 16 months, loss and grief have stalked the granite-floored corridors of the Retno Hotel.

On the evening of October 6, 2023, the family-run hotel was close to full occupancy. A few of the 70 or so guests were Palestinian Americans but most were from Gaza. Expecting to return home soon, they had brought just enough clothes for a week’s stay.

Among them were Ahmed Ayyash, a 72-year-old civil engineer from Gaza City, and his 62-year-old wife, Maha. Forty-four-year-old Shadia Abu Mrahil from Deir el-Balah was there with her 25-year-old son, Karam.

Like most of the guests from Gaza, they were regular visitors to the modest limestone building with its 45 double- or triple-bedded rooms. It wasn’t the quiet north Ramallah street that drew them there, nor the small courtyard out front with its plastic tables and chairs, although on sunnier days, the guests would sometimes sip their coffee there near a canopy of bright pink bougainvillaeas.

They were there to receive medical treatment – for cancer, heart problems and developmental disorders – that was unavailable in Gaza. Both Ahmed and Shadia have leukaemia.

They would travel via the Beit Hanoon crossing, managed by the Israeli army and known to Israelis as Erez, in northern Gaza to Ramallah. For a few days at a time, they would stay at the hotel while they received their treatment and then return home to Gaza. Relatives would often accompany them. Some had been doing this for years. For Ahmed and Maha, these medical trips also offered an opportunity to visit Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem and to eat kunafa with friends in Nablus, 50km (31 miles) away.

October 6, 2023, was a quiet day, a Friday. Most businesses in Ramallah were closed and many guests at the Retno Hotel took a break from their treatments. Ahmed went out to pray at a nearby mosque with Maha, his wife of 44 years. They had arrived in Ramallah the previous day and bought bread, cheese, chocolate, fruits and vegetables for their stay. When they returned to the hotel that evening, they ate dinner in the dining hall, and spoke to fellow guests before going to bed.

When they woke up the following morning, everything had changed. In the days that followed the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Israel launched a massive bombardment of the Gaza Strip and cut off food, water and electricity. The Palestinian American guests at the hotel fled. Those who stayed, hospital patients and their family members, waited anxiously for news from Gaza. The phone service was down and many were unable to reach their loved ones back home. Some crowded into the hotel owner’s office to watch the developments on television, wondering what the fast-escalating war would mean for their families and for their treatments.

Ahmed stayed in his room watching the news and scrolling through Telegram updates from journalists in Gaza. Guests who managed to contact loved ones during the sporadic moments when the phone service returned, shared whatever they learned with others. Others never got through.

“Some of the guests lost their children in the first month of the war, and I heard news of the martyrdom of many members of my family, such as the children of my cousin and his wife, and my cousin and her husband … and their children, and some friends,” Ahmed recalled.

Clouded thoughts of the future

Since 2017, the Retno Hotel has housed patients and their family members from Gaza during their medical visits to Istishari Hospital, a 10-minute taxi ride away.

It is among a network of accommodations — mostly hotels, but also lodgings including UNRWA facilities — housing Palestinians granted temporary permits by Israel to leave Gaza to receive medical treatment in West and occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The treatment is covered by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Ministry of Health.

Over the years, Nawaf Hamed, the 66-year-old owner and manager of the Retno, has tried to keep the place cheerful. The common areas were often filled with music – everything from Western folk to classical Arabic. Guests would sometimes play the instruments – a tabla, guitar, qanun (a Middle Eastern string instrument) – that Nawaf kept around the lobby. “We would sing, and we [would] dance!” he reminisced wistfully. Those joyful nights stopped with COVID lockdowns, and never quite returned.

When the war began, the permit arrangements for patients from Gaza quickly broke down. Those in hospitals in Jerusalem had to leave, fleeing to the occupied West Bank where they scrambled to register with the PA and find a new hospital. None were able to return to Gaza.

“The people [were] very afraid of the future,” recalled Nawaf of his guests.

Today, 400 patients from Gaza are currently registered with the PA with some staying in Ramallah as well as in Hebron, 60km (37 miles) to the south, and Nablus and Jenin, less than 100km (62km) to the north.

Over the months, more patients have moved into the Retno. Today, it is a temporary home to 33 adult and 14 child patients, and 37 family members. Seven patients at the hotel have died of their illnesses since the war started. As the others continue to fight their health battles, their family members have been killed, and their homes and former lives destroyed.

On a November afternoon, Shadia was sitting on a light grey couch in the corner of the hotel lobby where many guests gather. “What the war has done to my family, to my home, to my Gaza, kills me more every day than the cancer ever will,” she said, sighing.

As frail residents emerged from the lift, they greeted one another before heading to the hospital in shared taxis. A shuttle bus would bring them back later in the day.

Karam – his hair coiffed and beard well-groomed – sat beside his mother with his hands gently clasped in his lap. Nearby, Ahmed, dressed in a blue sweater and green button-down shirt, slouched in his chair, while Maha smiled warmly at fellow residents as they passed by. Other guests stopped to ask the front desk attendant, a woman in her 30s, for fresh towels or to grumble about the noise coming from their neighbour’s room at night.

03/03/2025

Clouded thoughts of the future

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