More than 100 critically ill and injured children in Gaza hope to come to the UK as soon as possible after the government announced a scheme to provide those in severe need with NHS care.
The government announced on Sunday that it would evacuate children from Gaza to the UK for treatment under a scheme to be announced within weeks.
While campaigners welcomed the announcement, they urged ministers to move quickly, saying children awaiting urgent medical care in the UK had died waiting, or were forced to be medically evacuated to other countries.
“We have previously had children on the list but because approval takes so long, some of those children have ended up dying,” said Omar Din, a co-founder of Project Pure Hope (PPH) and a healthcare executive in NHS primary care. “The government needs to move at pace.”
Through a private scheme, the charity has brought three children to the UK this year. Now, its efforts will provide a blueprint for the new taxpayer-funded scheme, which will operate in parallel.
“It’s not too late in the sense that there are people who can still be helped, there are many children,” Din said. But he added: “We should have done this much sooner.”
The UK’s decision to offer itself as a receiving state comes as starvation and famine from Israel’s aid blockade take hold in Gaza, where more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October. The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated as many as 12,500 patients in Gaza require medical evacuation, and humanitarian organisations have called on more countries to assist.
Last month, a charity launched legal action against the government’s decision not to provide medical evacuations against historical precedent, and ministers faced increased pressure from more than 100 MPs to act.
Charities hope that about 100 children on their existing lists will be permitted to come to the UK, along with a guardian and possibly siblings. PPH has told the government it has between 30 and 50 children who should come to the UK, and the charity Children Not Numbers (CNN) has 60 children in critical need of medical evacuation from Gaza.
Charities said there were many people – working in healthcare and other sectors – who were willing to donate their time and money to help. “We have a thriving private healthcare system in addition to our NHS system, and combined with the government behind them, I think services can be expanded to support a greater number of children,” said Din.
Looking to counterparts in Europe and the US, and the neighbouring countries Egypt, Qatar and the UAE, which had evacuated more than 7,000 patients as of April, according to the WHO, Din said the UK government should assist children “relative to our counterparts”.
One child the charity was assisting had fourth-degree burns to 40% of his body. However, discussions with the government over bringing the child to the UK moved too slowly, the charity said, and the child ended up being taken to Italy in June, along with a one-year-old boy with a congenital disease. The charity has also assisted medical evacuations to the UAE and Jordan.
“We’ve now developed a blueprint, we’ve got all the resources [and] learning. The whole pathway is there now for you to take and use the full force of government to scale [up] urgently,” said Din.
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Last month, CNN took legal action against the Home Office and Foreign Office over their decision not to provide medical evacuations. Welcoming the government’s announcement, a spokesperson said 71 children they were assisting had died due to insufficient treatment, medicine and delays to medical evacuations, since they first called on the prime minister to consider such a scheme in November last year.
“This is absolutely disheartening,” said a CNN spokesperson. “We had to wait around 10 months for it to happen.”
The charity said the 60 children it had in critical need of evacuation had their paperwork and medical records ready for final review from Israel’s coordinator of government activities in the territories (Cogat). Médecins Sans Frontières has previously called on the Israeli government to allow more patients to leave Gaza, and be more flexible, saying cases faced a lot of Cogat rejections.
“We are ready to go as long as we have the green light from the government,” said the CNN spokesperson.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said a cross-government taskforce had been created to pull the new scheme together as quickly as possible.
“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,” they said.