Gazan children denied life-saving medical care by UK visa delays

Yet Whitehall bureaucracy means that the first children to be treated by the NHS will not arrive until the start of September, nearly six weeks after the prime minister’s pledge.

The delay may be fatal, according to Project Pure Hope, the charity that has funded the medical evacuations of the only three children to be granted medical visas for the UK. Omar Din, the charity’s co-founder, said: “Each day of delay is costing children their lives. Needless death. A n entire list of patients that Project Pure Hope has readied could die before the UK finally implements its scheme.”

On Saturday, 96 MPs wrote to ministers asking them to give a timeline and adequate funding for the evacuations. The letter, coordinated by Dr Simon Opher, a Labour MP, said they should act "without delay" as the children were at risk of imminent death, the BBC reported.

Italy took in 31 children and their families on 13 August last Wednesday, having accepted 17 in June. The United States allowed 11 children in early August.

The UK’s approach contrasts with the previous government’s decision to send a team to Kyiv to evacuate 21 Ukrainian children with cancer to the UK for treatment by the NHS days after the Russian invasion.

Delays may lead to medical complications. Doctors in Jordan and Lebanon told The Observer they have been forced to postpone treatment for some children because they are too malnourished to recover from surgery.

More than 17,000 children in Gaza have been killed and another 33,000 have been injured, Unicef said last month. Din said some of those deaths were due to a lack of basic medical care in Gaza, since many of its hospitals have been destroyed.

He said the charity was “pleased” that the government had accepted its proposal to bring 30 to 50 children and their families to the UK to be treated by the NHS. “However, the delays establishing a UK scheme for Gazan children are unacceptable and must now proceed at pace and scale,” Din said.

Since the Gaza war began on 7 October 2023, EU countries including Spain, Italy, Ireland and Romania have accepted more than 200 children, mostly with complex medical needs. Most of the 5,000 children needing treatment have been evacuated to other countries in the region, including Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Lebanon and Jordan.

Six children arrived on 6 August at a reconstructive surgery hospital run by MSF, the international medical charity, in the Jordanian capital Amman. Dr Earnest Emetole, deputy clinical director at the hospital, said two of them arrived with “severe acute malnutrition”. They have been put on a high-protein diet so that they can be stabilised.

“When a patient arrives with severe acute malnutrition on top of a war-related injury, our first priority is stabilisation, not surgery,” he said. “Malnutrition severely weakens the immune system, causes anaemia, delays wound healing, and can also affect mental health. Operating immediately in such cases carries very high risks, so we focus first on gradually restoring nutritional status.”

One of the two malnourished patients who has severe burns requires frequent visits to the operating theatre for dressing changes to prevent infection and protect the wound, a process that is often painful. Once the patient’s condition allows, our plastic surgery team will plan a skin graft.”

MSF’s clinics in Khan Younis and Gaza city are screening more than 1,000 people a week, and there has been “a marked increase in severe acute malnutrition rates” since the end of June, Emetole said. “The arrival of these two malnourished patients in Amman reflects the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza and is a direct consequence of the ongoing siege and resulting food deprivation in the Strip.”

Project Pure Hope is helping another 30 children from Gaza go to the American University of Beirut hospital, for treatment by a team from the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund, who have expertise in treating war wounds based on decades of experience of other conflicts.

Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon from London who has worked in conflicts in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, said it was disappointing that the UK government had not done more to help Gazan children. “The first you know about the fact that the Spanish are doing it is when you see kids landing in Spain,” he said. “That’s the difference [with the UK]. Do you talk about it for six or seven months or do you just get up and do it?”

His team is also not able to treat some children because they are severely malnourished, he said.

A government spokesperson said they were “accelerating plans to evacuate 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”.

Photograph by Abdallah F.s. Alattar/Anadolu via Getty