Starmer ‘actively blocking’ maimed Gaza children from coming to UK for treatment

Stark contrast with immediate access for wounded Ukrainian children adds to scandal of grotesque asylum discrimination

The UK government is denying access to the UK for ill, maimed and horrifically injured Palestinian children wounded by Israel’s genocidal onslaught in Gaza, allowing only two children from Gaza to enter during eighteen months of the genocide – and those two were only allowed in last week.

The block on Palestinian children seeking medical attention is a stark and racist contrast with the treatment of white Ukrainian children evacuated to the UK for NHS treatment since the beginning of Ukraine’s war with Russia.

The two Palestinian children have appeared to be selected because they suffer from inherited illnesses, rather than being maimed by bombs or sniper bullets, or brought to the edge of death by Israel’s illegal starvation blockade.

Doctors Omar Abdel-Mannan, James Smith, Professor Nick Maynard, Ang Swee Chai and Ghassan Abu-Sittah wrote in Middle East Eye this week:
⁠
As a coalition of doctors with direct experience working alongside our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza’s hospitals during the genocide – along with colleagues advocating from the UK – we have seen just how far the government has gone to deflect responsibility. Every part of the evacuation process – permits, escorts, transport, surgery – has been managed by civil society groups and volunteers. The government has not contributed a single pound.⁠
⁠
Children’s lives should never be politicised, but this is the reality for all Palestinian children. Two were permitted into the UK – not because they were the most in need, but because they posed no threat to the western narrative. In doing so, the UK government made its humanitarian red lines brutally clear – and showed us exactly who it deems worthy of care.⁠
⁠
Everyone except Palestinians.”

They went on to accuse the UK of actively blocking Palestinian children severely wounded by Israel’s criminal invasion and particular targeting of children with bombs and bullets:

The UK government hasn’t just failed to help; it has actively blocked efforts to transfer severely injured children – those with blast wounds, amputations and burns – to UK hospitals for essential treatment.

Officials from both the Home Office and Foreign Office have consistently denied visas, citing supposed logistical, medical or security reasons. These excuses collapse under minimal scrutiny, since we know that the UK government has rightly facilitated the transfer and treatment of children from Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan in recent years.

This isn’t a bureaucratic failure; it’s overt political obstruction.

The bar on Palestinian children in desperate need is an extension of the Starmer government’s racist discrimination against Palestinians seeking refuge from Israel’s slaughter of more than 200,000 civilians – including over 100,000 children. In February, Starmer personally attacked an immigration judge who granted asylum to a Palestinian family under a scheme Starmer said was intended for (overwhelmingly white and 45% blond) Ukrainians, saying:

We’ll close that loophole.

Clearly, allowing people into the UK who are fleeing a genuinely genocidal, white-supremacist attacker who has no interest in peace and wants their extermination or complete removal and their whole land is not something the supposed ‘former human rights lawyer’ – whose deeply racist regime is misusing anti-terror laws to persecute journalists – wants.

Even when it comes to the most innocent victims – the Palestinian children bombed, burned and shot by the white supremacist Zionist regime simply for existing on land it wants for ‘Lebensraum’ (‘living space’) – the nazi term used by Israeli ministers and journalists for their land-theft ‘Greater Israel’ project.

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