Gaza Healthcare System

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Dr Opher) for securing this much-needed debate.

I will focus on one specific aspect of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza where the UK can really make a difference: medical transfers to the west bank. Israel’s continued ban on medical transfers from Gaza to hospitals in the west bank, including East Jerusalem, costs lives every day. It is not an unintended consequence of conflict, but a deliberate decision. Before October 2023, Gaza’s health system functioned as part of a wider Palestinian medical network, with around 2,000 patients travelling each month from Gaza to hospitals in East Jerusalem and the west bank for specialised treatment. The Augusta Victoria and Makassed hospitals alone handled more than 40% of Gaza’s referrals. At times, nearly one third of their beds were filled with Gazan patients.

However, that system collapsed overnight. Since October ’23, Israel has banned all internal medical transfers from Gaza. In January 2026, the Israeli Government confirmed to its own High Court that it is standing by its refusal to allow seriously ill patients to travel to the west bank, including East Jerusalem, citing vague security concerns but offering no evidence of the threat supposedly posed by innocent Palestinian civilians. As of early 2026, more than 18,500 patients approved by the World Health Organisation are waiting for evacuation because their treatment is unavailable in Gaza. More than 4,000 of those patients are children, and more than 1,000 people have already died while waiting for care. For every week that the ban remains in place, more preventable deaths will become inevitable.

Israel permits some patients to travel abroad for treatment, with more than 4,000 patients evacuated to third countries. But that only makes its continued refusal to allow access to nearby Palestinian hospitals even harder to defend. Hospitals in East Jerusalem are within a couple hours’ drive of Gaza. The WHO has been clear: reopening that route is the fastest, safest and most cost-effective way to save lives. Instead, patients are forced through the Rafah crossing, which operates under extremely severe restrictions. Exits through the crossing are capped at around 50 patients per day, with each allowed only two accompanying family members. At that pace, they will not survive long enough to be treated. At the current rate, Save the Children estimates that evacuating those in need could take more than a year.

Furthermore, while departures through Rafah are possible, re-entry is heavily restricted, with more than 20,000 Palestinians who left Gaza earlier in the war still waiting to return. That puts medical evacuees in an impossible position: if they leave for essential treatment, they risk permanent displacement. Medical evacuations must not become de facto forcible transfer. Under the fourth Geneva convention, Israel, as the occupying power, has a duty to ensure access to medical care and supplies, and to maintain medical services. Article 33 explicitly prohibits “collective punishment”. A blanket ban on all medical transfers imposed regardless of individual circumstances risks breaching all of those obligations.

The Government rightly emphasise the importance of international humanitarian law, and now is the time to put that into practice. The Government should publicly urge Israel to lift the ban on internal medical transfers and continue emergency overseas evacuations only as a stopgap, not as a substitute for lawful access to nearby care. Restoring access to hospitals in the west bank and East Jerusalem would save lives, relieve pressure on Gaza’s collapsing health system and reaffirm the basic principle that the sick must never be treated as a security risk by default.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Snowden]

I will make a little progress first, given the time, but I will take interventions. The new NGO restrictions that are about to come into place affect some 15% of the aid agencies operating within Gaza, and those agencies have contributed about 1% of the aid delivery throughout the conflict. Some of those that have been notified of the new restrictions have applied and been approved to operate again in the area.

[Sarah Champion]

The Minister referenced the aid that—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs (Mr Hamish Falconer)]

He is the shadow Minister.

[Sarah Champion]

The shadow Minister—thanks. Is the shadow Minister aware that the aid that is getting in includes things such as chocolate bars, and not items that are so desperately required to address the medical needs? He speaks about volume, but we are talking about the substance of what is getting in—the lifesaving aid, not the peripheries that people are making money from.

[Mr Snowden]

I thank the hon. Lady for my temporary elevation; I enjoyed my 30 seconds as a Minister, but that is all I will get for now. I will come on to future aid, the volume of aid that needs to get in, dual-use items, to which I have referred, and other issues. I just wanted to pick up on and address some of the alternative facts.

The situation in Gaza is serious and severe. Hamas and their Iranian sponsors bear responsibility for the continued suffering. Hamas launched their attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. They have refused to disarm and have infiltrated and used civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, as shields and military defensive positions. The whole House should be united in calling Hamas out, and it is important that the Minister gives us an update on the steps that the Government are taking to support the implementation of the 20-point peace plan for Gaza, including the removal of Hamas.

[Mr Snowden]

I will come on to the UN’s stats on the amount of aid that has been misappropriated shortly. I thank the hon. Member for her intervention, but I think it is a tad rich to talk about one-sidedness when the word “Hamas” was hardly mentioned in many of the contributions that we heard earlier.

The Government say that they have been calling for broader aid access, but calling for something is not the same as achieving it. We need to know whether Ministers have put forward specific, concrete proposals for the opening of individual crossings and entry points into Gaza, whether those proposals have been presented directly to the Government of Israel, and their response.

Will the Minister tell us what quantity and type of medical aid has been funded and prepared for this moment? Where is it currently stationed? How much of it has entered Gaza? Which organisations are distributing it? Critically, what new safeguards are in place to ensure that UK aid reaches innocent civilians, not terrorist groups? Aid diversion is not a peripheral concern; it is central.

Since the ceasefire announcement on 10 October 2025 and 11 February 2026, the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs notes that 1,532 aid pallets have been verified as being intercepted during transit within Gaza. Although the destination of the pallets cannot be confirmed, it does not require too much imagination to work out where they have ended up. That is why we cannot discuss Gaza’s healthcare collapse in isolation from the wider political and security situation—the two are inseparable. The ceasefire provides an opening, but a ceasefire is not peace, and the Government seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge what is needed to convert one into the other.

If the ceasefire is to translate into something sustainable, Hamas must be removed from power once and for all, and their terrorist infrastructure must be dismantled. Events of recent days—the violence between Hamas and armed groups and clans within Gaza—underline precisely why Hamas cannot be permitted any future role in the governance of the territory. Hamas have no regard for human life or human dignity; they never have.

That brings me to governance. Rebuilding Gaza’s health system without addressing who actually governs Gaza is an exercise in futility. Have the Government had any meaningful say in the composition of the transitional Administration? Has anything of substance on governance reform emerged from the so-called memorandum of understanding with the Palestinian Authority—a document that did not even address corruption or antisemitism in school curricula? If the Palestinian Authority is to play an extended role, it must implement the most significant reforms in its history. That includes on healthcare, welfare, education, and frankly, basic democratic accountability.

[Sarah Champion]

Will the shadow Minister give way?

[Mr Snowden]

I am running out of time, and I have taken several interventions. Our support should be conditional on those reforms being delivered. Have the Government made that case clearly to the Palestinian Authority?

I also ask the Minister whether the UK will be scaling up its involvement in the Civil-Military Co-ordination Centre. Is Britain contributing to the demilitarisation of Gaza and the disarming of Hamas? Have the Government had any discussions with the United States about the consequences for Hamas if they do not engage constructively with phase 2—

[Sarah Champion]

On a point of order, Sir Jeremy. The subject of the debate is medical healthcare in Gaza, but the shadow Minister is not referring to that at all, apart from a tenuous “relating to healthcare” statement. Can you give some clarity, Sir Jeremy, on whether his speech is on point?

[Sir Jeremy Wright (in the Chair)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. As she knows, because she heard me intervene in the debate earlier, I have been listening carefully to ensure that speakers keep to the subject of healthcare. As she also heard me say to the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), it is perfectly in order for speakers to talk about the context to a degree. I have been listening carefully to the shadow Minister; if what he had said had been out of order, I would have told him so.

I will take the opportunity while I am on my feet to say that the hon. Lady and all Members know that this has been a serious and passionate debate throughout. I hope that Members will respect the fact that passionate contributions from both sides of the argument are perfectly rational and in order, and should be heard with the same respect that all other contributions have been heard with.