LONDON: The UK government is set to announce plans to evacuate hundreds of children from Gaza for medical treatment.

Up to 300 children will be given free healthcare on the National Health Service, in a scheme running “in parallel” with the group Project Pure Hope, a source told The Times.

So far, just three children from Gaza have been granted visas to travel to the UK for vital medical treatment since the start of the war in October 2023.

The three cases followed months of painstaking work by Project Pure Hope to raise money from private donors. 

In the coming months, children evacuated from Gaza to the UK will be accompanied by a parent or guardian, and siblings where deemed necessary.

Sources told The Times that biometric and security checks will be conducted on families by Home Office staff before traveling to the UK.

More than 7,000 people have been evacuated from Gaza on medical grounds since the start of the war, 5,000 of them children, according to local health officials. Most have traveled to neighboring Egypt as well as the Gulf.

The UN children’s charity UNICEF estimates that as many as 50,000 children have been killed or wounded in the conflict.

Around 200 children have traveled to Europe for treatment, including to Spain, Italy, Ireland, Norway and Romania. 

Earlier this week, the third child to travel to the UK from Gaza, 15-year-old Majd Al-Shaghnobi, was greeted at London’s Heathrow Airport, alongside his mother and two siblings, by well-wishers bearing flowers.

Al-Shaghnobi was struck by debris from a tank shell in February 2024, shattering his jaw and leaving him with life-changing injuries. He will undergo treatment at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London.

Last month, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, pledged to help bring more children from Gaza to the UK for medical assistance.

“I know the British people are sickened by what is happening. The images of starvation and desperation in Gaza are utterly horrifying,” he wrote in the Daily Mirror. 

“We are urgently accelerating efforts to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance — bringing more Palestinian children to the UK for specialist medical treatment.”

The new scheme is believed to have been orchestrated by Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.