An Israeli court has denied a petition to allow a five-year-old Palestinian boy with aggressive cancer to enter Israel for a bone marrow transplant and antibody immunotherapy — treatment his doctors described as urgently required and unavailable in either Gaza or the occupied West Bank, where the child has lived since 2022 receiving medical care.

The Jerusalem District Court ruled that the child’s registration in Israel’s population registry as a Gaza resident placed him under a blanket ban on Gaza patients entering Israel that has been in effect since October 7, 2023. That the child had not lived in Gaza in years was immaterial. That he would likely die without the specific treatment available only in Israel was immaterial. The registry classification controlled the outcome.

The Guardian reported on the case, describing a family caught inside the machinery of collective punishment — a policy in which an administrative category carries a death sentence for a kindergartener. The child’s treating doctors had made the medical case clearly. The court’s answer was to classify him correctly, not to treat him.

This is not an isolated case. The UN and multiple international health organizations have documented that thousands of Gazan patients requiring specialized care unavailable in the territory have been denied exit permits, had permits revoked, or are waiting in a system that processes a fraction of those who need it. Since the October ceasefire, Rafah has partially reopened for medical evacuations — but as of early February, only 36 patients were allowed to leave over the first four days of operations, against a waiting list of tens of thousands.

Israel has described its restrictions on Gaza residents as security measures. But when a five-year-old boy with cancer is denied a bone marrow transplant because of where he was registered at birth, the security rationale does not hold. What holds is a policy of collective punishment that the International Court of Justice has warned may constitute a violation of the Genocide Convention — a policy applied with bureaucratic precision to children too young to understand what a registry is, let alone why it should determine whether they live or die.