A group of people come together to greet two seriously injured Palestinian teenagers from Gaza arriving at Dulles International Airport near Washington for urgent medical treatment on August 9, 2025.
Images Mehmet Eser / Middle East / AFP via Getty Images
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Images Mehmet Eser / Middle East / AFP via Getty Images
The US State Department said on Saturday that it stopped all visitors’ visas for people in Gaza. The department made this announcement on the X social media platform, claiming that this interrupts these visas to carry out a “complete and in-depth examination of the process and procedures” used for the granting of “medical humanitarian” visas.
The State Department did not immediately respond to the NPR request for more details on the number of visas of this type has been granted in recent months, but its announcement has described it as “a small number”.
A humanitarian group based in Ohio, Heal Palestine, is the main American organization helping to evacuate people – mainly injured children and family members – and bringing them to several cities in the United States for medical treatment. According to the organization’s website, he evacuated 148 people from Gaza, including 63 children.
On August 4, the organization announced the arrival of 11 children injured by criticism, aged 6 to 15, as well as their brothers and sisters and caregivers in several major cities, including Boston, Atlanta and Dallas, for medical care.
The news of their arrival led the far -right activist, Laura Loomer, to claim – without providing support – on social networks that heal Palestine “is in mass of Gazans in the United States” under “false affirmation” of humanitarian aid.
She also demanded that “the Trump administration needed to close this abomination as soon as possible before a member of the family of one of these Gazans became a thug and kills the Americans for Hamas”.
Writing on X on Saturday, Loomer took the merit of the decision of the State Department to stop the humanitarian visa program for the people of Gaza, to qualify the new “fantastic” and to thank Secretary of State Marco Rubio for this decision.
“This policy has no meaning,” explains Edward Ahmed Mitchell, National Deputy Director of the American-Islamic Relations Council (CAIR), who published a statement of the State Department’s action. “It is pure cruelty. It will literally put life to more children in danger.”
He added that the United States has a “special moral obligation” to provide medical treatment or the capacity of families to come to the United States and to obtain their own medical care.
It is not known how long it will take the State Department to examine the humanitarian medical visa process for people in Gaza.
More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the War of Israel-Hamas in October 2023. And the shortages of disastrous food in recent months have been killing more people, including children.
A recent report by an organization supported by the United Nations following food security in the world revealed that a famine scenario “The worst case” takes place in Gaza. The UN estimates that almost 100,000 Palestinian women and children face severe malnutrition requiring treatment immediately, and about a third of the 2.1 million people in Gaza have not eaten for days.
