LONDON: The British government must bring sick and injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK “without delay,” a group of MPs has said.
The cross-party group of 96 parliamentarians made the appeal in a letter to senior government ministers, the BBC reported.
Children in the Palestinian enclave are at risk of imminent death, and any barriers preventing their evacuation to Britain must be removed, they said.
Responding to Gaza’s “decimated” healthcare system requires adequate funding and a detailed timeline for child evacuations, the MPs added.
UN children’s charity UNICEF has said that more than 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or injured since the beginning of the Gaza war in late 2023.
The medical and humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave has reached “horrific proportions,” said the MPs’ letter, which was coordinated by Dr. Simon Opher, a Labour MP and GP.
Signatories to the letter, addressing the health, home, and foreign secretaries, said they were working with Medecins sans Frontieres to expedite the evacuation of injured and ill Palestinian children to Britain.
The children and their families must be allowed to claim asylum after their treatment is completed, the letter said.
The UK Home Office previously said that biometric checks would be carried out before Palestinian children and their carers travel to the UK, a decision that was questioned by the letter’s signatories.
Plans to evacuate seriously ill or injured children from Gaza were being carried out “at pace,” the government said earlier in August.
A spokesperson said: “We are 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.”
Several hundred Palestinian children are expected to be evacuated as part of the scheme.
Since late 2023, the UK has channeled funding toward the treatment of injured and seriously ill Palestinians in hospitals across the Middle East.
Liz Harding, of MSF’s UK branch, welcomed the MPs’ letter and called on the government to waive its biometric visa requirement.
Britain must “urgently act on its commitment by creating a dedicated, publicly funded pathway based on clinical need, not bureaucracy,” she added.
