LONDON: A first group of severely ill children from Gaza have arrived in the UK under a scheme allowing them to receive urgent medical treatment, the British government said Wednesday.
A cross-government taskforce has spent weeks coordinating the “complex humanitarian operation” to evacuate the children and their immediate families for specialist care under the state-run National Health Service (NHS), it added.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said that it had supported the medical evacuations of 10 “critical” children from Gaza to the UK, alongside 50 of their companions.
It comes after Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in July his government would launch the scheme for an unspecified number of children hit by the war.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said in a statement on Wednesday welcoming the evacuations that Gaza’s health care system has been “decimated” and “hospitals are no longer functioning.”
