More than 900 Gaza wheelchairs remain stuck in Jordan warehouses amid aid restrictions
More than 900 wheelchairs donated for injured children in Gaza are still being held in warehouses in Jordan, according to the supplied reporting. The shipments, sent by two Australian charities, have not reached the children they were intended to help because of restrictions on aid deliveries into Gaza. The wheelchairs are being stored in facilities managed by the Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization on the outskirts of Amman.
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The donations arrived in Jordan in two separate consignments in February 2025 and a third in October 2025. They came from Kids on Wheels Alliance, based in New South Wales, and Wheelchairs for Kids, based in Western Australia. Dr Abdullah Al-Balawi of the Palestinian Australian New Zealand Medical Association said he felt great pain seeing the boxes piled up and said the wheelchairs were dedicated to Gaza's amputee children and those paralysed as a result of the war.
He also said the aid should not stop. The Jordan Hashemite Charity Organization said the Israeli agency responsible for aid coordination in Gaza, COGAT, had blocked the chairs from entering the territory. An Israeli government source denied that an application for the Australian wheelchairs had been rejected.
In a general response, COGAT said it had allowed thousands of wheelchairs into Gaza during the war and said there were no quantitative restrictions. The conflicting accounts leave the status of the Australian donations unresolved. The case highlights the wider challenge of moving humanitarian supplies into Gaza during the war.
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Wheelchairs are a specialised form of aid, but they are also part of the broader logistics system that determines whether medical and disability support can reach civilians inside the strip. For children with severe mobility injuries, delays can mean prolonged dependence on family members and limited access to daily movement, schooling and treatment. The dispute also shows how aid deliveries can become entangled in coordination procedures between humanitarian organisations and Israeli authorities.
The charities involved have been making wheelchairs for children for years, according to the supplied material. Wheelchairs for Kids has operated for more than two decades and uses volunteers at its factory in Wangara, in Perth's northern suburbs. The donations were organised through humanitarian channels rather than as commercial shipments, and the storage of the chairs near Amman has left them outside the conflict zone but still unavailable to the intended recipients.
That has made the Jordan warehouses a holding point in a wider aid access dispute. The reporting also indicates that Australian officials have raised the blocking of the wheelchair donations with Israel multiple times. That suggests the issue has moved beyond a single shipment and into diplomatic and humanitarian coordination.
The fact that the wheelchairs were sent in several batches over many months also points to a persistent bottleneck rather than a one-off delay. The situation is especially sensitive because the intended recipients are children with amputations or paralysis linked to the war. What remains unclear is when, or whether, the wheelchairs will be allowed into Gaza.
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The supplied material does not confirm any timetable for release, nor does it show whether the dispute has been resolved. The next development to watch is whether the aid coordination authorities approve movement of the shipments from Jordan into Gaza, or whether the donations remain in storage while discussions continue.
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