I am a British Egyptian paediatrician who has worked in the National Health Service (NHS) for more than 15 years. During annual trips to Gaza, I have worked alongside local doctors and witnessed first-hand the impact of Israel’s blockade and bombardment on children’s health.
I know what it means to see children die of preventable causes. But never in my life have I witnessed this level of calculated cruelty, nor such cold complicity from those who claim to care about international law and children’s rights.
On 30 July, I flew with a 15-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza named Majd Alshagnobi, his mother and two siblings from Cairo to London for specialist treatment at the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. Two of his other siblings and their father remain trapped in northern Gaza.
I joined the flight as a friend and supporter of Project Pure Hope, working alongside Kinder Relief, both of which played a vital role in arranging Majd’s care in Egypt and helping secure his transfer to the UK. Their work is a testament to what small networks of determined people can achieve when governments fail to act.
Majd’s mandible had been shattered by a bomb blast. An obvious scar across his neck marks the site of a tracheostomy performed in a hospital in Gaza under siege. His survival is a testament not just to urgent evacuation, but to the relentless efforts of Gaza’s doctors and his family, who fought to keep him alive under impossible conditions.
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It should never take a teenager with a broken face and a scarred airway to remind Britain that Palestinian children are human beings. But that is where we are.
Majd is one of the lucky few. Thousands of other critically ill or injured children are still trapped in Gaza, because the UK has refused them visas – offering entry instead to a couple of children with congenital conditions, while those with blast injuries, amputations, renal failure and malnutrition were left behind.
It is a policy so shameful it defies explanation, except as part of the same system of dehumanisation that starves children on camera while Britain wrings its hands and does nothing.
Hidden cost
Majd had to leave behind two siblings and his father in northern Gaza, living in makeshift tents on the beach. For so many families in Gaza, every departure carries not just the relief of survival, but the heavy uncertainty of when – or if – they will ever be reunited.
This is the hidden cost of every evacuation: survival split into pieces, families torn apart at checkpoints, children forced to carry both hope and loss in the same small body.
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Project Pure Hope has stepped into this void, piecing together lifelines child by child, case by case, against a bureaucracy designed to make them disappear. I have seen this organisation fight for every visa, every hospital bed, every safe passage.
Every evacuation is a triumph, but also an indictment: of a government that sells arms to the very state that made this flight necessary, and of British institutions that have built the scaffolding of disbelief that enables genocide to unfold before our eyes.
That small, ordinary joy – a giggle on an escalator, the grip of a brother’s hand – became an act of quiet resistance
This week, the Guardian reported that around 100 critically ill and injured children in Gaza may finally be evacuated to the UK for NHS treatment under a new government scheme – the result of tireless efforts by groups like Project Pure Hope. But with dozens of children having already died while waiting, this must be the start of a sustained, government-funded programme – not a one-off gesture to quiet public outrage.
For several months, the faces of starving children in Gaza have flooded British media: emaciated infants with hollow eyes, toddlers too weak to cry, teenagers like Majd with their bodies torn apart. It was as though the UK media had suddenly discovered that Palestinian children exist. But for those of us who have spoken daily with doctors inside Gaza, who have begged governments and professional bodies to act, these horrors are not new.
Rather, this situation is the inevitable outcome of a deliberate campaign of dehumanisation – one that has been sanctioned by British mainstream media, shielded by the British government, and carried out by an apartheid state with total impunity.
Would this be happening if the victims were Israeli children? Ukrainian children? British children? Of course not. But Palestinian lives, and especially Palestinian children, have been treated as disposable – either invisible or demonised.
Discovering a new world
Every scar on Majd’s face tells the story of a system. It is a system that licences the bombs that shatter mandibles; a system that starves hospitals of medicine and fuel; a system that offers platitudes while refusing visas to the very children it has helped wound. The starvation of Gaza, the amputations, the broken jaws – none of this is a glitch. It is the system.
And yet, just hours before we boarded the plane, I saw something the system cannot touch. For Majd and his siblings, it was their first time in an airport. Wide-eyed, they clutched their mother’s hands as we entered the terminal.
And then, like children everywhere, they were drawn to the moving escalators. They jumped on them, laughing, racing to see who could reach the top first, their voices echoing in the cavernous hall. For a few precious minutes, the war receded, and they were just kids discovering a new world – doing the same things any child in any country would do.
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That small, ordinary joy – a giggle on an escalator, the grip of a brother’s hand – became an act of quiet resistance. It was a reminder that these children’s innocence, their playfulness, their ability to imagine a future beyond rubble and checkpoints, is itself a form of steadfastness.
Israel can destroy homes, starve families and bomb hospitals. It can try to grind people down to rubble and statistics. But it cannot touch what I saw in that airport concourse: the wonder in a child’s eyes, the laughter that can break through months of terror – the determination to live, written in the simple act of play.
Their resistance is their existence. Every giggle, every question about cartoons or swings, every toy carried across borders is an act of defiance. These children carry not just their own survival, but the survival of a people.
We owe them more than charity. We owe them justice. That means opening Britain’s doors immediately to every critically injured child in Gaza, and scaling this work at speed. It means establishing a government-funded evacuation and treatment scheme – the same level of national mobilisation afforded to Ukrainian refugees – with the infrastructure, capacity and expertise that are already in place.
It means ending the arms sales that make their wounds inevitable. It means confronting the racism that has rendered their lives negotiable. And it means tearing down the system that deems some lives worth saving and others worth erasing.
As the flight continued, Majd sat quietly with his siblings, their small hands wrapped around the few belongings they had brought from Gaza. Watching them, I realised that no matter what is destroyed – homes, hospitals, whole neighbourhoods – there is something Israel will never break: their innocence, their resistance, their steadfastness, and their determination to exist.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
