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‘Not only is the UK actively killing us, but they refuse to help us’
“The UK has, for a very long time, supported and participated actively in our killing and has colonised most of the Global South, and the hospitals that you visit today in the UK are built on our shoulders and the shoulders of our ancestors,” Hala Sabbah of the Sameer Project says at the Corbyn-led Gaza inquiry.
“Yet how many children from Gaza came to the UK for medical evacuation?” she asked, adding that you can count the number on “one hand”.
“Italy, Spain, other countries have hosted hundreds of children into their hospitals. The UK refuses completely,” she said.
“So not only is the UK actively killing us, but they refuse to help us.”
The number of children injured in Gaza ‘totally unacceptable’: UK surgeon
Victoria Rose, a British surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza several times and whose last mission was in May at Nasser Hospital, says the number of children injured is “totally unacceptable”.
Speaking at the informal Gaza tribunal taking place in London, she said, according to the UN, 50,000 children have been injured in Gaza and that when you compare this number to the 2,400 in Ukraine, “you start to get a picture of what’s going on”.
She usually operated on 10-12 patients a day, the first six of whom were usually under the age of 15, and during the tribunal, she ran through a list of her patients on one of those days in May.
“I started with an 18-month-old with 50 percent burns. We then went onto a three-year-old boy with 35 percent burns. In the UK, this is a 50/50 survival burn rate,” she said.
“Then, a five-year-old girl with her arm blown off. We salvaged half of her hand. Then I operated on her sister, while my colleagues operated on her mother next door. Then, a seven-year-old girl, who has her knee blown off. Then, a boy who had his left ankle blown off, his brother was being operated on next door,” she said.
British surgeon sees no proactive action by UK after speaking with Starmer
Victoria Rose, the British surgeon who has volunteered several times in Gaza, told the Corbyn-led Gaza tribunal that following her most recent visit to the Strip in May, when she saw many patients with malnutrition, she spoke with Prime Minister Keir Starmer on a Zoom call, but has not seen any proactive action from the UK government since.
After that visit, Rose appeared on several media networks and was interviewed by Al Jazeera to talk about what she had witnessed.
“I think that the UK government possibly had no idea how many of us were going to Gaza until the most recent trips in May and June, when we came back with footage of the malnutrition,” she said at the Gaza tribunal, an unofficial inquiry examining the UK’s role in Israel’s war. “And that’s the first time that we’ve managed to meet with the UK government.”
She said that, along with campaigners, she had written to David Lammy and Starmer in November 2024. She spoke with them half a year later.
Asked by Professor Neve Gordon if the meeting resulted in “any proactive actions by the UK government”, she responded, “Not that we’ve been informed of, no.”
She also said Israel is allowing fewer foreign doctors into Gaza now, compared with earlier periods in the war.
