Plans to evacuate hundreds of children from Gaza for NHS treatment will save lives but must be set up rapidly as mass starvation spreads, a UK-based campaign group has said.
The Government is set to announce the initiative to bring up to 300 Gazan children who require urgent medical care to the UK within the coming weeks, the Sunday Times reported, citing a Whitehall source.
But Bassem Farajallah, co-founder of the UK Gaza Community Group, an organisation representing British Palestinians, said the plan should be “very easy” to implement, and could be done so within “two or three days”.
“It’s a political decision,” he told The i Paper. “If they’ve got the list of the people they want to evacuate, they can implement it in two days or in three days.”
Farajallah said the new scheme will “save children’s lives” and “give people hope”, but called for more support from the Government as the community has been “neglected for so long”.
“We hear from our close families back home and we know the tragic situation in hospitals. Children are dying in front of their families because they cannot have any medical attention, and now, more to it, they cannot even have food. So, yes, definitely, it’s life-saving for children,” Farajallah added.
“It [will] have a huge impact on our community. We’ve been neglected for a year and a half, so, at the moment, we see some hope in a change of the Government’s stance to understand what the Gazans are going through. And to indicate this by helping our children back home, that’s definitely a very positive thing.”
The scheme will happen “in parallel” with an initiative by Project Pure Hope, a group set up to bring sick and injured Gazan children to the UK for private medical treatment, according to The Sunday Times.
The newspaper reported that a parent or guardian will accompany each child, as well as siblings if necessary, and the Home Office will conduct biometric and security checks before travel.
More than 50,000 children are estimated to have been killed or injured in Gaza since the war started in October 2023, according to Unicef.
On Sunday, it was reported that six people had died in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours from hunger and malnutrition, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said.
According to the ministry, this brings the number of deaths from hunger since the start of the war to 175, including 93 children.
Only three children have been granted medical visas following months of campaigning by Project Pure Hope. The organisation had been granted permission for a further 30 children to be evacuated to the UK for private treatment.
Labour MP Steve Witherden, who has been actively supporting the campaign, welcomed the Government’s initiative but warned that there needs to be a ceasefire that holds for long enough for the children to be evacuated safely.
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“It is fundamentally important that all sides keep talking,” he told The i Paper. “The ideal would obviously be an immediate and total ceasefire.
“However, if we are talking about a temporary cessation of violence to allow for these 300 children to be extracted from Gaza, we need to be certain it will hold long enough for this extraction to take place, as we have seen many false dawns and have observed all too frequently how fragile and unstable any pauses in the fighting have been thus far.”
Witherden said he has heard from doctors who recounted “harrowing and heartbreaking” stories of children in Gaza “dying slowly from quite basic injuries because there was a lack of surgical equipment and an absence of the means to undertake operations in sterile conditions”.
He said the doctors shared “horrifying” accounts of an “absence of hygiene” and an “absence of anaesthetic” at the few remaining functioning medical facilities in Gaza.
Farajallah said the process of transporting the sick children from Gaza to the UK would be “very easy”, explaining that aid workers could “liaise with the Israeli side” before evacuating them via the border with Jordan, and then to the UK.
He said aid workers and community groups could communicate with the World Health Organisation and the Gaza health ministry to establish which children are in “urgent need” of UK care.
The UK and Jordan have been working together to air drop aid into Gaza following warnings of widespread malnourishment.
Farajallah added that the scheme was a “good start” but called on the Government to “stop selling arms to Israel”, saying: “Those arms are being used officially for killing those children and killing those innocent people in Gaza.”
Witherden, the Labour MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, echoed these demands, saying: “By far the biggest thing would be a halt to any further weapons sales into the theatre of conflict.”
A Government spokesperson said: “We are taking forward plans to evacuate more children from Gaza who require urgent medical care, including bringing them to the UK for specialist treatment where that is the best option for their care.
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“We are working at pace to do so as quickly as possible, with further details to be set out in due course.”
The i Paper has contacted the Government for further comment.
Last week, Sir Keir Starmer said the UK would recognise Palestine as a state from September unless Israel met certain conditions, including agreeing to a ceasefire in Gaza and reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.
Concerns have been raised that this could see a Palestinian state recognised without Hamas releasing the remaining Israeli hostages.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in response that the UK’s demands for Hamas to release the hostages are “absolute and unconditional” and play no role in the future of Gaza.
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