Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to accelerate the process to bring wounded children from Gaza to the United Kingdom.

The Government is working urgently to get some of the critically ill and injured children medically evacuated from Gaza. The first patients are expected to arrive in the United Kingdom in the coming weeks.

Children will only be transferred to the UK where it is clinically safe to do so and in the interests of each individual patient and where there is capacity within the National Health Service to treat them. They will be accompanied by their immediate family which means their parents, and siblings aged under 18 years old. Where both parents are deceased, they must be accompanied by a legal guardian. We will not be evacuating unaccompanied children.

It is too early to say how long this process will run for and thus the number of children we expect to be evacuated.