LONDON: A medical charity has written to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer pleading with him to allow two severely ill children from Gaza to be flown to the UK for lifesaving treatment.
One of the children, three-year-old Haitham, was badly burned when an Israeli airstrike hit the family home, killing his father and pregnant mother, Sky News reported.
He has been left with burns across 35 percent of his body and is being treated in Nasser hospital, the last working medical facility in southern Gaza.
British surgeon Dr. Victoria Rose, who is treating Haitham, said she is worried he might not survive because the hospital no longer has the resources to look after him properly.
“It’s a massive burn for a little guy like this,” Rose said. “He’s so adorable. His eyelids are burnt. His hands are burnt. His feet are burnt.”
Referring to the renewed violence in Gaza, she said: “Every time I come, I say it’s really bad, but this is on a completely different scale now. It’s mass casualties. It’s utter carnage.
“We are incapable of getting through this volume. We don’t have the personnel. We don’t have the medical supplies. And we really don’t have the facilities.
“We are the last standing hospital in the south of Gaza. We really are on our knees now.”
Haitham’s grandfather, Hatem Karara, said Haitham had also suffered internal bleeding.
He said: “What did these children do wrong to suffer such injuries. To be burned and bombed? We ask God to grant them healing.”
The second child identified by the UK-based charity Project Pure Hope is one-year-old Karam, who is suffering from a rare birth defect in which nerves are missing from parts of the bowel.
His protruding intestine could easily be operated on with the right skills and equipment available in the UK.
An initial operation was carried out in Rafah, but when his family was forced to flee to Khan Younis, Karam’s condition worsened, his mother Manal Nayef Mostafa Adra said.
She said a foreign doctor told her that the surgery needs to be redone outside of Gaza.
Omar Dinn, co-founder of Project Pure Hope, said the charity would fully fund bringing the children to the UK.
He said the UK government had made strong statements recently condemning Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the blocking of aid supplies, and now had the opportunity to act.
“We’re giving them an action, which is the ability to allow two more children to come to the UK for privately funded medical treatment and to save their lives,” he said.
“If we don’t act for these two children now, it’s very likely that the outcome will be nothing but death.”
Two girls from Gaza with serious health conditions were flown to the UK earlier this month for specialist treatment. But only three Palestinian children have been allowed into the UK for healthcare since Israel launched its devastating offensive in Gaza 20 months ago.
Of the nearly 54,000 Palestinians killed in the war, 16,000 have been children.
