The ordinary Brits evacuating children from Gaza

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, the ordinary Brits on an extraordinary mission to evacuate children from Gaza.

0:18Over the summer, the government promised to bring hundreds of desperately sick and injured children from Gaza to the UK for life-saving treatment. We are accelerating efforts to evacuate children from Gaza who need critical medical assistance. Dozens of countries across the Middle East and Europe have rescued thousands of Palestinian children with unbelievable injuries. After almost two years of stalling, Britain was finally stepping up. But so far, only a handful of children have safely made it through on the government scheme. And meanwhile, four friends, ordinary citizens, got together and worked out a way to bring kids here themselves.

1:01We've seen the entire healthcare system there destroyed. We all felt that we had some of the skills, some of the network, and certainly the drive to try to do something which could save lives, improve lives, specifically for children. Even with the ceasefire, Gaza is the single most dangerous place in the world for a child to exist. Israel has killed more than 20 ,000 children. More than twice that number have been maimed. At one point, more than 10 children lost one or two legs every day, making the strip home to proportionally more young amputees than anywhere else on the planet. But behind these statistics are families enduring unimaginable choices.

1:46Any given day, you end up breaking down in tears because you're seeing the most devastating injuries. And when you look at that child, you see your own child's face. If I was born in Palestine, that's my family. That's my child. And everybody's watching this live streaming in front of them. These images will live with us for life. You know, you never forget what you've seen.

2:13When is the help coming? And if there is a lifeline, who gets to go, who has to stay? From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, Getting Out of Gaza, the story of one family broken in two.

2:37Islam, can you describe Gaza City to me when you were living there?

2:45No matter what I say, I wouldn't be able to describe its beauty.

2:57Islam Phil Phil is a mother of five from Gaza City. She lived there her whole life, grew up, got married, had kids. Islam speaks gently, but there is a quiet determination about her. We speak via Dina, who is translating for us. Islam's three youngest children squeeze in around her on the sofa.

3:23Nadar, she told me, makes mischief. He's ten, fidgety, and you can see a hint of cheekiness about him. Rahaf, the baby of the family, is Islam's only daughter. She's eight but really small and is hiding her big brown eyes behind her mum's sleeve.

3:42And then there's Majd, a huge football fan. He's 15 now, quiet and serious. He's wearing a medical face mask to cover his injuries. No one ever believes that these two are brothers, because one's really naughty and the other one's really wise. Raising the kids was full on. Islam separated from her husband after Rahaf was born. But life was good. The kids loved Fridays, when the family would go to the beach or the fun fair or hang out with cousins.

4:17You know, in 10 minutes I could be by the sea. In one minute I could be at my sister's. Another minute I'd be at my mum's. I can't describe how beautiful life was. All my loved ones were together, like, in the same area. we weren't all displaced and in different places.

4:43Anywhere you went to Gaza in Gaza City, you'd feel like you were in paradise.

5:02Islam remembers that she was getting Nader ready for school when the bombing began on October 7th. Hamas' dawn attack on Israel left close to 1 ,200 people dead. Within hours, missiles were raining down on Gaza City.

5:19It was literally the first month of when the school term starts. So I woke up and everything was, what's the word, chaos.

5:45Because we lived near a mosque, we left immediately, because whenever they start bombing, they always bomb the mosques first. So we left straight away.

6:04They ran leaving their home with almost nothing Like so many families around them Islam and the kids were forced to keep moving for the next 18 months First to Rafa, then to Khan Yunus and back to Rafa, back to Khan Yunus They ended up living cramped together in a tent on the beach Majd was 14 years old and he took it upon himself to find a way to feed the family. Food was scarce and expensive. The little aid that was available could only be found at a few distribution points. Everyone knew it was dangerous to go. Can you talk to me about what happened the day that Maj got injured?

6:51He was injured when I wasn't with him. He was on his way to get food aid from the distribution centre. He'd gone down to get flour. He didn't enter the distribution centre because he could see that the Israelis had surrounded the place.

7:17They fired at him and his friends. Two of his friends died and the rest were all injured.

7:27And the place where he was injured, like the exact spot, no one was allowed to go in and help and get the injured people out. They were just meant to leave them where they were. Majd bore horrific injuries. His jawbone was shattered and he could barely breathe.

7:48So he tried to get up again to save himself. and that's when he was hit in the leg. But he fell in a place where people could get to him.

8:05So when he fell, they thought someone, one of the bystanders thought he was alive and took him to hospital, but when he got to hospital, they thought he'd died. He had tried to get up, but he was shot at again. Majd had suffered so much trauma and had bled so much it was thought there was no way he had survived He was being sent to the morgue when he managed to raise a finger

8:36He managed to give them a sign that he was alive but all the operating theatres were busy so they did his surgery in the kitchen

8:55During the operation they inserted a tube to help him breathe and they took out the bullet from his leg The pain was excruciating but the medics did everything they could to save Maj's life and he underwent an emergency tracheostomy that is a tube inserted into his neck to allow air into his lungs essentially allowing him to breathe. I wasn't told that he was injured. I didn't know that first day he was injured because they didn't tell me. The people around me didn't tell me because he'd been injured seriously and they didn't know how to tell me. Much had been taken to a hospital in the north of Gaza, but Islam was stuck in the south.

9:45Travel between the two had been made impossible by the Israeli military. Islam couldn't go and see Majd. She couldn't be with him.

9:56My sister was there, though. And she's, you know, their sisters are like mums. So she looked after him. She didn't leave him for a second. It was months until Islam and Majd would be reunited. Still recovering with a breathing tube in his neck, Majd returned to the tent on the beach. Islam cared for him as best as she could. But the conditions were dangerous, unhygienic and cramped. Majd also needed extensive facial reconstruction surgery. The attack had left him unable to properly speak or swallow. Islam went from hospital to hospital, refusing to give up. Eventually, she found out about the list.

10:43The World Health Organization had been logging the cases of the most vulnerable children who needed to be urgently evacuated from Gaza. They were working with a myriad of medics, charities, NGOs to try and safely get kids out for medical treatment abroad. Islam was determined to get Majd on that list.

11:13Omar, can you tell me a bit about yourself and the work that you do in healthcare? So my name is Omar Din. We are in Croydon today. My background is... Omar Din is a healthcare executive from London. That essentially means he works on the management side of the NHS and also that he's always really busy. But Omar is a doer and on top of his day job, he's helped set up a charitable organisation called Project Pure Hope. So myself and a group of friends, Frazana, who's a radiologist, Junaid, who's a GP and a scientist, and Raza, who's a barrister. One of the things that we kind of came together on around October and November of 2023 was the situation we could see unfolding in Gaza.

11:59and so as we could see that unfolding we knew one of the things that would be really important is where specialist treatment was required and not available in Gaza could we provide that somewhere else certainly the UK was first on our list because we know we have some of the best pediatric care in the world here in the UK and as I said we had relationships with many of those hospitals we still do and we wanted to be able to support those children using specialists and in other countries as well. See? A doer. Could this group, a radiologist, GP, barrister and a manager, get critically ill Palestinian children out from a war zone?

12:38And we just wanted to bring that knowledge together with our experience of working at leadership levels in government and in the NHS to try to facilitate some healthcare needs of children. At first, Project Pure Hope lobbied the UK government to launch a medical evacuation scheme for guards and children, similar to the one that successfully allowed Ukrainians to escape Russia's deadly invasion in 2022. But nothing happened. So Project Pure Hope partnered with NGOs in the Middle East to identify children who could be eligible to come to the UK for treatment. In November 2023, when the Conservative Party was still in power.

13:17They heard about a young boy named Luay. Luay had significant, very, very significant burns all across his body. And we submitted his case to the UK government to support a UK medical evacuation, meaning a government-led evacuation. And we never really got a response to that. Luay was then transferred to Doha in Qatar. And he was put into a facility there. But very, very quickly he started to decline and on Christmas day in 2023 he died and just before he died you know it's a young child he's asking for his mother and the clinicians had to get somebody to pretend to be his mother because he'd been orphaned to give him some comfort in his last moments

14:18The team then realised they couldn't rely on the UK government to move quickly. So they began to figure out a way to run the evacuations themselves. Because we could see that that was very slow moving, despite providing the cases, despite providing all of the support and network that we had, we wanted to just get on with what we could do. And so we moved on with our private medical evacuation work, because nothing stops us from doing that, right? There's no real involvement of a government when you're doing a private medivac. All they really needed to do was to review the case and to issue the visa.

14:54We would have to pay for that visa. So, you know, we cracked on with doing the medivacs that we could do in the region and to other countries. And we never gave up on the hope and the efforts in trying to get children here to the UK using our private route. You can imagine the mountain of bureaucracy involved in this. But between the four of them, they got it done. Once word got out, donations came flooding in on their JustGiving page. Just yesterday, I got a message from a paediatrician, and she told me that on the weekend she got married. And on her wedding invitation, she put a QR code to our JustGiving page.

15:35She said, don't bring gifts, donate to Project Pure Hope. The UK has world-leading paediatric care. Now it was just a matter of matching the specialist to the children most in need. Anamal, how do the cases come across your radar and what is the criteria? So we've worked with NGOs such as Palestine Children's Relief Fund to help with case identification, that's selecting patients who would be suitable candidates and we've also work directly with the World Health Organization. In Gaza, certainly since the borders were closed, the World Health Organization has become the central point where they hold a database of all healthcare cases which are listed.

16:21And also they are the agency through which if there is going to be a medical evacuation, it's from their list that you select one of those cases. And then working with the Israeli authorities, they're called COGAT, to get security clearance for those patients to be cleared to leave. So we've worked with all of those agencies, and then also with the ministries of health involved. There are so many agencies involved, and you have to go through all of these steps of clearance and approvals. So before the child has even arrived in the UK, they've gone through about five or six agencies. And that's layers of security as well.

16:59laser security. So it's even before the UK has done their biometric checks, which is another process in itself. And one of the challenges is that biometrics is not possible to complete in Gaza because there is no centre there anymore. Can you explain to us what biometrics are exactly? So if we have a child that we have identified for treatment in the UK, they will have to go through a visa application process. Part of that visa application process is the enrolment of their biometrics. That's typically your thumbs and other data which they want to... Fingerprints. Fingerprints and also your demographic details as well.

17:36All of that gets submitted and that goes together with a very detailed and extensive visa application. It's not just for the individual, it's also for their companions. And that's usually their guardian, their parent, if they have one. In our case, it's been the mothers of the children. I'm talking about the children were brought to the UK. It's been their mothers. And in each of the cases, they've come with one or two siblings. Just to be clear, the normal rules of applying for a visa in a war zone, you would expect to be very different. And of course, they have been very different. You've seen biometrics waived in the case of Ukrainian refugees, am I right?

18:13Right, right. And you've seen children come over and despite, I mean, what were the layers of security that are provided then or the layers of identification? Yeah, I mean, we are aware of that. And I do think there has been a differential in how this has been managed. We've been so privileged and proud to support children from Ukraine, children from Hong Kong, children from Syria, Afghanistan, so many countries, myself and my colleagues, particularly those of us who've worked in healthcare. We've been involved in many of those schemes. We've provided direct healthcare to people from those countries, and proudly so.

18:55It did feel that it was an uphill battle, trying to make this happen for Gazi children, and I never quite understood why. In April this year, Project Pure Hope were finally able to bring over two children to the UK, Two little sisters, 12-year-old Reina and 5-year-old Reina. Despite all the many, many hurdles, Project Pure Hope had proven that their plan worked.

19:33Back in Gaza, Maj's mum was trying to gather the evidence needed to make Maj's case.