UK urged to move fast after PM signs off on receiving wounded Gaza children

Middle East Eye

6 days ago

A British organisation bringing children from Gaza to the United Kingdom for medical treatment has called on the UK government to "urgently operationalise" a plan to bring 30 wounded children after the prime minister announced further evacuations late on Friday.
In a recorded video, Keir Starmer said that the UK had "put millions of pounds of aid into Gaza", including an extra £40m this year, but "that help is not getting in".
"So we are scaling up our work. We are accelerating efforts to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance, bringing them to the UK for specialist medical treatment," he said.
Starmer's comments were welcomed by the UK-based Project Pure Hope (PPH), which brought the first two - and, so far, the only - Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK for treatment earlier this year in partnership with the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund.
The two girls, Rama, 12, and Ghena, five, came to the UK from Egypt with congenital conditions and have been receiving life-saving treatment in the private wings of leading London hospitals, funded entirely by charitable donations.
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Over a month ago, PPH asked the government to help facilitate and fund a cohort of 20-40 acutely ill and suffering children to come directly from Gaza to the UK, and had been awaiting a decision.
Now, with Starmer's sign off, PPH is urging the government to move quickly, saying it has already paved the way for such evacuations with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Israeli and Jordanian authorities, and could activate its plan to bring the group of children immediately.
"Time is of the essence," said Omar Din, one of PPH's co-founders. "Every day of delay risks the lives and futures of children who deserve a chance to recover and rebuild."
MPs pressure government
Starmer's announcement came after nearly three dozen cross-party MPs called on the government to help facilitate legal pathways and also help with the costs for Palestinian children coming to the UK for treatment.
The WHO estimates that at least 12,000 adults and children need to leave Gaza for specialised care. With a short list of countries willing to take them and Israeli authorities limiting those permitted to leave the enclave, aid workers and doctors say people are dying before they can get out.
One major obstacle to bring Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK for medical treatment has been the difficulty in obtaining visas that require biometrics. The UK closed its only authorised biometric registration centre in Gaza in October 2023, leaving the nearest visa applications centres in Egypt and Jordan.
In a 25 July letter to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, the MPs recalled the case of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani campaigner for girl's education, who received life-saving surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham in 2012, four days after she was shot by the Taliban.
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The MPs, led by Labour's Sam Rushworth and including International Development Committee chair Sarah Champion, said the precedent "demonstrates what can be achieved with international co-ordination and political will".
"If the government is not willing to defer biometric registration until arrival in the UK, we exhort you to work with the WHO, COGAT and the Jordanian government to secure passage to the consulate in Amman, where the relevant biomatrics check can be done prior to flying to the UK," they wrote.
The MPs also raised the question of funding. With National Health Services facilites used, the government would apply the NHS tariff plus 150 percent surchage, meaning "costs can run to hundreds of thousands of pounds per patient", they said.
They noted the role the UK had played in supporting just under half a million people to receive essential healthcare in Gaza and funding a polio vaccine campaign.
"Could [Official Development Assistance] not be used to likewise support life-saving health care 'at cost' in the UK? Paediatric specialists around the UK stand ready to help," they wrote.
"From the 669 children rescued by Sir Nicolas Winton on the Kindertransport 86 years ago, to the more recent Home for Ukraine scheme, the British people expect our country to play our part."
Din told MEE that, in order to get started with bringing the group of children, his organisation is waiting for the government to confirm details, including funding and timing.
MEE asked the Foreign Office on Monday when the government planned to start evacuating the children from Gaza, if it would allocate funding for their treatment, and whether their evacuations would be organised through a scheme like the one for the Ukrainians, but did not receive an immediate answer.
On Tuesday, Din is scheduled to travel to Cairo to pick up Majd, the third child that PPH will bring to the UK for private medical treatment.
"Whilst the UK scheme is getting off the ground, we carry on with our privately funded work," he said.