Westminster looking at treating wounded Gaza children in UK
Children injured in Gaza could be brought to the UK for medical care, Lord Cameron has revealed.
The former prime minister said the UK government was “looking closely” at the possibility, as he urged Israel to “think very seriously” before further action in Rafah.
Israel intensified its offensive in the southern Gaza town of Rafah this week, where 1.4 million displaced Palestinians have fled to seek shelter from fighting elsewhere.
Now Lord Cameron has said children could be given medical help in Britain.
Speaking in the House of Lords yesterday, he said: “This is Project Pure Hope, we are looking very closely at this – is it possible to take the people in greatest need and take them to British hospitals, as we have done in the past?
“The early work we’ve done is to say that there’s much we can do in the region and we should probably do that first. So helping in the field hospitals that have been established, helping to send medical teams to referral hospitals that are being used in the region supporting organisations like medical aid for Palestinians.
“Now if that leads to the identification of specific cases where actually they would be better off taking that long journey back to Britain and going to Great Ormond Street Hospital, then we certainly don’t rule that out and continue to look at it.”
Israel has made destroying Hamas’s governing and military capabilities and freeing the hostages the main goals of its war.
The conflict was launched after thousands of militants rampaged through southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 people captive, including women and children, according to Israeli authorities.
Lord Cameron insisted Israel must “stop and think” before launching more attacks in the city of Rafah.
He told peers: “The people who are in Rafah, on many occasions, have already moved three, four or five times, and it’s not possible to move again.
“They can’t go north, because they’ll be going back to homes that have been destroyed. They can’t go south, because that would involve going into Egypt, which none of us want to see and the Egyptians don’t want to see.
“And that is why it’s so important that the Israelis must stop and think before going ahead with any operations in Rafah.”
Lord Cameron said the UK would continue to judge whether Israel was “compliant with international humanitarian law”. He said: “We want to see an end to the suffering, an end to this killing. Let me just make this point that the pause we are calling for, we want to turn into a ceasefire by making sure the conditions are right for getting a stop in the fighting to mean a permanent ceasefire.
“You have got to dismantle the operation of terrorist attacks, you have got to have a new Palestinian Authority government in place.
"You have got to give the Palestinian people a political horizon to a better future and a two-state solution, and crucially you have got to release all of the hostages and do that very quickly.”