British Palestinians demand UK action as Gaza relatives face starvation
Basem Farajallah speaks with his sister in Gaza every day. She is diabetic and surviving on scraps of bread. He has 80 family members still alive in Gaza - but 40 others have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023, including 25 who were wiped out in a single strike.
Farajallah emphasised that he is not alone. He is the co-founder of the UK Gaza Community, a group of some 350 British Palestinians with relatives in Gaza.
For the last 18 months, they have been forced to watch them disappear under the rubble of their homes under relentless Israeli bombardment. Now, they are watching them starve amid Israel’s ongoing blockade on the territory.
Since Israel's war on Gaza began 20 months ago, the group has been fruitlessly pushing to bring their families to the UK, launching a petition that garnered over 100,000 signatures demanding the government create a Ukraine-style visa scheme to reunite them.
While UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pronounced Israel’s blockade on Gaza “intolerable”, Farajallah said they have been “neglected” by the government, which has rejected their calls for the creation of the scheme.
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The Home Office recently told Middle East Eye that some 500 Palestinians from Gaza have been brought to the UK since the war began.
“For us, its like torture,” Farajallah told Middle East Eye. “We are not talking about huge numbers, when we created our list of the family members we wanted to bring to the UK, it was less than 2000 people.”
Farajallah spoke alongside a panel of British Palestinians and their families, patched in from Gaza via Zoom calls, at a conference on Thursday calling on the UK government to impose sanctions and a total arms embargo on Israel.
“Nearly every member of the community here in the UK has close family members in Gaza, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,” Farajallah said.
“For the last 600 days, we have lived in constant fear, checking with our families every day, not a single day passed without fear.”
“Today, after 600 days of uncertainty, we know one thing for sure: if this starvation continues, our families will not survive, not for weeks, but days.”
‘I’m losing myself’
Ali Mousa, a 30-year-old British Palestinian who lives in Manchester, struggles to stay in contact with his sister Hend, a teacher at an Unrwa school in Gaza. Internet and power outages mean calls are sporadic.
In the periods of silence, he fears she could have been killed in a strike or have collapsed from hunger.
Hend, a 29-year-old mother of three who addressed the conference via a patchy Zoom call, said she was at her home near al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, expecting imminent forced expulsion orders.
“If this happens, where will my family and I go?” she said.
She described how her three-year-old asks her every morning if they will have breakfast.
“Unfortunately, my answer is always no,” Hend said.
As a school teacher, Hend said she is also confronted with her students’ suffering on a daily basis. She conducts her classes with students sat on the floor, which she also uses as a blackboard.
In one of her classes, a student lost consciousness because he hadn’t eaten for two days.
When another student didn’t complete an online test, Hend contacted the boy’s mother to ask what had happened. The mother replied that he had been killed.
“I feel like I’m losing myself,” she said.
Wafaa Shamallakh, 38, an Arabic interpreter who works for Kingston Council and whose siblings are in southern Gaza, described how her husband-in-law and her 15-year-old nephew were forced to walk over an hour just to reach an aid distribution point.
“Hundreds of thousands of people had come there from the north and south of Gaza, desperate to find a bag of flour, a little sugar, maybe some pasta,” Shamallakh said. Drones flew overhead, firing at them.
“They came back empty handed; no food, no flour, nothing. They had to run for their lives.”
“This is what it means to survive in Gaza,” Shamallakh said.
‘Beyond anything I’ve seen’
Dr Rossel Mohrij, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who volunteered at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital in December, described amputating limbs with blunt instruments and without sterile dressing.
“We used cling film to dress wounds, vinegar for infection,” she told the conference.
The doctor recalled being inundated with casualties following an air strike targeting a nearby school where displaced families were sheltering.
“It was beyond anything I’ve seen, I will carry it with me forever,” Mohrij told the conference. “A flood of the dead, dying, the dismembered. Children too stunned to cry, staring at their missing body parts.”
She described standing at the bed of a child, who had been stuck under the rubble and presented late with severe burns to his legs.
“They were so severe, the blood supply to his legs was restricted.
“Me, some other visiting surgeons, some local surgeons, stood at his feet, debating how to make his death less excruciating,” she said.
'A flood of the dead, dying, the dismembered. Children too stunned to cry, staring at their missing body parts'
- Dr Rossel Mohrij, plastic and reconstructive surgeon
“He did not understand our words but I guess he felt our despair. He quietly covered his face with a white cloth to block the world out. He died the next morning.”
For Farajallah, and many other British Palestinians, Starmer’s pledges to ensure the flow of aid to Gaza and to secure a ceasefire are no more than a “political show”.
Despite Starmer’s condemnation of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian aid seekers over the past week, the government is so far resisting calls for a total arms embargo and recognition of Palestine.
At the conference, the voices from Gaza were shaking with grief, but were also defiant. They were not asking for pity, but for action.
“Let this be not another press conference where we beg for basic humanity. Let this be a turning point where Britain stops whispering about international law and starts upholding it. Because the people of Gaza are not waiting for your sympathy,’ Shamallakh said.
Mousa turned to his sister, Hend, saying, “I want to speak directly to you. We are here for you, and we will never leave you, even if your whole world does.”
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