Children in Gaza die as David Lammy says UK is 'happy to do more' to help

Urged in parliament to do more for Palestinian children in Gaza who need medical treatment, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said last week he would be "happy to do more" if requests were made to bring them to the UK.

There is, in fact, a request on the table that is still awaiting a decision.

A British coalition of doctors, lawyers and humanitarians asked the government over a month ago to facilitate and help fund a group of 20 to 40 Palestinian children to receive treatment in the UK that is no longer available in Gaza’s devastated healthcare system.

The request from Project Pure Hope (PPH) comes as children with treatable conditions who have been proposed for medical evacuation are dying before they make it out.

UN data shows Israeli authorities have drastically limited the number of patients permitted to leave the Palestinian enclave in recent months.

According to the World Health Organization, at least 12,000 adults and children need to leave Gaza for specialised care, but only 33 were evacuated last month, with just 58 having left in July so far.

Since Israel's war on Gaza began, over 7,000 Palestinians have been evacuated. Mostly to Egypt, the UAE and Qatar, with Jordan, European countries - particularly Italy, Spain and Romania - and the US taking much of the rest. 

The United Kingdom has taken just two.

Rama, 12, and Ghena, five, arrived in April with assistance from PPH and the US-based Palestinian Children's Relief Fund.

'We cannot now turn our back on the children of Gaza'

- Sam Rushworth, Labour MP 

The girls have been treated in the private wings of leading London hospitals, funded entirely by charitable donations.

Last week, Lammy told parliament's international development committee: "If there are more children we can work with [Project Pure] Hope and others to bring in, of course we will do that."

Omar Din, one of PPH's co-founders, said Lammy's comments were "very welcome" and that the government has been supportive of individual cases PPH has highlighted.

But now the initiative is pushing for more: unlike Ghena and Rama, who came to the UK from Egypt with congenital conditions, PPH is asking the UK to welcome a group of children directly from Gaza who have recently been wounded or are suffering acutely.

"The only way we can do that is with government support," Din told Middle East Eye.

Their call for the UK to do more is being echoed by Labour MP Sam Rushworth, whose question during the committee hearing sparked Lammy's comments. 

"We honour the work of people like Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped refugee children escape from the Nazis, and more recently our 'Homes for Ukraine' scheme. We cannot now turn our back on the children of Gaza," Rushworth told MEE.

"Both of those schemes required legal changes to serve a humanitarian purpose. So I am looking at what needs to change so Britain can open our hearts, hospitals, and homes if needs be to save innocent lives and relieve suffering."

'We couldn't move fast enough'

The case of Haitim, a three-year-old suffering severe burns, shows exactly why Project Pure Hope believes it's important to make the pathways for Gaza's children to the UK easier - and that evacuating several at once would increase efficiency.

On 15 May, Haitim's home in southern Gaza was bombed, killing his father and pregnant mother instantly. The toddler survived, but 35 percent of his body was burned. 

When British plastic surgeon Victoria Rose met him at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza's Khan Younis, she worried.

"He looked very scared. His eyelids were burnt," she said. "He was so little and it was such a big burn."

Haitim was taken into an operating theatre where Rose and others cleaned his wounds and started dressing them. At this point, he became acutely unwell, spiking a temperature and developing an ulcer in his stomach.

Ulcers are a well-known consequence of burns, but it is very uncommon that they develop so quickly and in such a young child. "He needed a specialised paediatric burns unit," Rose said.

The UK has some of the best burns units in the world, including one at the hospital where Rose works in London.

As soon as she had met Haitim, she started calling colleagues in the unit and Project Pure Hope to see what could be done.

If Rose could get Haitim to London, there would be a bed for him, she was told.

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A second boy, Karam, was also on PPH's radar. The one-year-old had been undergoing surgery in the European Hospital in southern Gaza when it was bombed. He required further surgery.

So the plan was to bring both boys to the UK. But they would need visas and their biometrics would have to be taken. The nearest UK visa application centres where that could happen are in Egypt and Jordan.

Before those involved could get the boys to Jordan, the Italian government stepped in. MEE understands that, under an agreement between the EU and the WHO, Italy and other European countries are able to take patients without having to issue passports or visas. 

According to Rose all they needed in that case was approval for their evacuation from Cogat, the Israeli military unit overseeing movement logistics between Gaza and Israel. 

"For the Americans, it is the same," Rose said. "That can still take time, don't get me wrong. Children are dying on the evacuation list so it's not great, but what the UK do is put on another layer of bureaucracy."

Din said: "We couldn't move fast enough. We tried very, very hard, but you do need government intervention in this and support.

"We are really pleased of course that they are now safe and receiving treatment, but we did really want to treat them in the UK."

Uphill battle 

Even without the UK's requirements, aid workers and doctors say it is a feat to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza for medical treatment. 

They say this is largely because Israeli authorities, who must sign off on all evacuations, make it hard and because there are so few countries willing to accept patients and exert required political pressure to get them out.

Médicines Sans Frontiers said last week that since the start of the war it has only been able to evacuate 22 patients for medical care.

"This list originally [included] hundreds of patients and we were blocked with no response from the countries we were approaching," said Hani Isleem, MSF's project coordinator for medical evacuations from Gaza. 

To seek treatment abroad, patients first register with the Palestinian health ministry and the World Health Organization. Then a list is provided to countries to pick which patients they will be best suited to help. 

'You have to coordinate with Israel. You have to coordinate with Jordan. So it's really complicating the system even more'

- Amande Bazerolle, Médicines Sans Frontiers' emergency coordinator in Gaza

Once a country has picked who it wants to evacuate, Cogat has to sign off on their departure.

Since Israel closed the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza in May 2024, aid workers say it has been much more difficult to get patients evacuated and that it has become even more challenging in the past few months.

Amande Bazerolle, MSF's emergency coordinator in Gaza, said evacuations have "dropped completely".

Bazerolle told MEE that since June it has been "very difficult" for UN agencies and humanitarian organisations to engage with Israel about the evacuations as Israeli authorities focused on implementing aid distribution in the enclave through the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

"They were so focused with that, there was no other way to discuss and move forward," she said.

Bazerolle also said that medical evacuation flights that were leaving from Ramon Airport in southern Israel have also been stopped recently.

With the Rafah crossing still closed, that leaves Jordan as the location where medical evacuees must go to get out. 

"So you have to coordinate with Israel. You have to coordinate with Jordan because they are going to end up there before they can fly out to a third country. So it's really complicating the system even more," she said.

A Cogat spokesperson told MEE that the Israeli army, through the agency, "is working to allow and faciliate the exit of patients and their escorts from Gaza through the sovereign territory of the State of Israel to third countries".

"In this context, dozens of evacuations from the Gaza Strip through Israel to host countries around the world have been coordinated in recent months, most of them for patients in need of continued treatment outside the Gaza Strip," the spokesperson said. 

"As evidence, in recent weeks, over 2,000 patients and their escorts have exited the Gaza Strip for treatment in third countries, as well as Gazans holding dual citizenship or residency visas."

The spokesperson did not immediately break down for MEE how many of the 2,000 figure were patients.

The spokesperson added: "It should be emphasised that such passage is contingent upon a request from a third-party host country and the completion of an updated security screening conducted by the security authorities prior to entry into the sovereign territory of the state of Israel."

Inevitably, Palestinian patients on the evacuation list are dying before they can get out of Gaza. But MEE understands that the exact number is not being recorded by the health ministry because the healthcare system is so disrupted that there is no capacity.

What is clear is that the pace of evacuations is so slow that the WHO has said it will take years to work through the backlog at the current rate.

"There is really a bottleneck," Bazerolle said. "But it starts with the countries. Saying they are going to take 20 patients? Thank you, but there are 12,000 patients actually."

'They are just children'

Many, including Din and British politicians, have highlighted the support that the UK government has previously provided for those in need of medical care fleeing other conflicts.

He and the other co-founders of PPH have worked together in England's National Health Service for the past 15 years.

"In the NHS, we've delivered care to Ukrainian, Syrian and Afghan refugees, in all of the crises that have taken place in the last few years. And we were very, very honoured and privileged to do that," he told MEE.

"There is no reason why Palestinian children shouldn't have the same recourse to humanitarian support. What’s the difference between a Ukrainian kid and a Palestinian kid? There is no difference. They are just children."

Din said PPH has recently told British officials that trying to bring Palestinian children over individually was not a good system.

'The UK government has been incredibly generous in other cases. We are asking them to exercise that wonderful spirit for Palestinian children'

- Omar Din, Project Pure Hope

"The issue with it moving slowly is that the risk of mortality is very, very high. It’s happened to us before where we had kids on our lists and they ended up dying before we could do anything. You have to move fast," he said.

Scaling up the number of children received at once will, he acknowledged, require government funding to supplement more than £1m that PPH has already raised.

"We are not diplomats, we are not the NHS, we aren't the government. We are ordinary citizens and we ask the government to step up to do what it has in its long history of being very generous in disaster aid work," he said.

Din said the PPH "live by the fact that every child deserves hope".

"That’s number one. Secondly, we live by the fact that if you save one life, it’s as though you saved the whole of humanity," he said.

"Having said that, if you look at a practical level, the amount of effort it takes to get one or two children, you may as well have one cohort. There is a real efficiency to be had. And the UK government has been incredibly generous in other cases - we are asking them to exercise that wonderful spirit for Palestinian children."

Rushworth, the MP for Bishop Auckland, said it was "heartbreaking to see children orphaned, suffering from starvation, maimed or injured - innocent victims of war and war crimes". 

In many, if not most, cases, he said, children will be better off treated closer to home and supported by surviving relatives. "I am only talking about cases where there is a real need for Britain to step up," he said. 

MEE asked the UK government whether it was seriously considering PPH's request, what might be holding it up and when a decision could be expected.

The Foreign Office declined to comment on record.