This article explores how adfāl al shawāri’ (street children) receive international medical aid in Cairo, the Middle East and North Africa’s largest and most populous city. Based on ethnography conducted between 2007 and 2009 in one French-funded children’s shelter, it argues that westernbased international aid organizations increasingly approach children as “biological sufferers” and that this depoliticizing approach eclipses children’s gendered agency and the structural violence shaping their lives. Drawing on the life histories of two homeless children, the research demonstrates how international medical aid can sometimes produce paradoxical effects in the lives of child humanitarian subjects in the global south.