Conflict and the Cancer Care Continuum in the Middle East: Effects, Economic Burden, and Actionable Solutions

Focusing on the Middle East, this narrative review examines how conflict contributes to delays across the cancer care continuum, including prevention, early detection, diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, survivorship, and palliative care. Mechanisms include the destruction of health facilities, workforce displacement, interrupted supply chains, constrained health budgets, and the diversion of services toward emergency response. These challenges reduce investment in prevention and restrict timely access to therapy, leading to poorer clinical outcomes and increased mortality. Sociocultural barriers, including stigma, misinformation, trauma, and limited public awareness, further delay patient presentation and undermine treatment adherence and continuity of care. This narrative review focuses on peer-reviewed studies and reports published between 2021 and 2026 (with older seminal studies for historical context) to clarify how conflict disrupts cancer care, analyze economic burdens and inequities, and map the relationships between health system fragility and sociocultural barriers. Drawing on this analysis, the review proposes a phased operational framework that tailors strategies—including mobile oncology, tele-oncology, decentralized diagnostics, cross-border referral, and supply chain safeguards—to the security and functional levels of each setting, as well as to governance and financing mechanisms.