Rupert Lowe vs. Thirty Children

A Few dozen Palestinian Children are Being Flown Here for Life-Saving Treatment - This Has Sent a Certain MP Over the Edge

Rupert Lowe is a man who is terribly angry.

Constantly. Noisily.

What I find most impressive about this constantly simmering annoyance is not only its depth, but its breadth.

On any given day, you can find his increasingly deranged X account having a good old fannywobble about, among others, translation services, burqas, HMOs, legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, Halal food, vaccines, charities, journalists, Islam, hotels and even in one very memorable case, a group of four charity rowers that he mistook for an invasion off the Norfolk coast.

All totally normal.

Something that’s been recently added to Rupert’s list of things to shout at, is children coming to the UK for treatment.

Rather, to be more specific, he is furious at the thought of approximately 30 to 50 Palestinian children who have been reported to be on their way to the United Kingdom to receive treatment on the NHS. This was his response:

“The BBC reports that '30-50' Gazan children will be brought to the UK for medical assistance.

Nobody else will say it, but this is madness.

It is not our responsibility.

The BBC reports - "it is understood some may enter the asylum system after completing treatment."

They will all stay. They will all stay with their families, forever.

There is now essentially a Palestinian refugee scheme.

Hundreds will turn into thousands.

The answer has to be sorry, but the answer is no. Not when British children are suffering and even dying because of delays in medical care.

I will be called a vile monster, but we must put British children first.

I make no apologies for stating that.”

The man is fuming about this, which, let’s be honest, is telling, and also, not unexpected.

Reporting by the BBC on 18 August 2025.

Now, it is true that there are reports that there is a plan underway to provide treatment on the NHS for a group of children from Gaza, I would never dispute that, but what I do think is pretty important is that we address some of the misconceptions that have come with this announcement that have been proliferating in the wake of Rupert’s rage.

“Why should we be helping kids from Gaza when our own NHS is collapsing?”

Because these are not theoretical children on a spreadsheet, they are living, breathing (barely, in some cases) human beings with catastrophic injuries and illnesses - burns, amputations, organ failure, advanced paediatric cancer - and no functioning health system around them after much of the medical infrastructure they would usually have relied on has been nearly completely annihilated.

There’s this impression that these are kids sneaking into the GP queue in Croydon to ask for antibiotics, whereas the reality is that they are being brought into highly specialist centres that already take humanitarian cases.

And look, if the question is really “can we both treat British kids and save a handful of Palestinian kids with shattered lungs and missing limbs?” then the answer is yes, obviously and resoundingly, yes.

It’s not even a choice.

Unless, that is, you’ve reached the point where your ability for compassion and empathy has been so thoroughly corroded that, in your mind, watching children die is somehow a badge of “protecting our NHS.”

"Isn't this just the start of a secret Palestinian refugee scheme? They'll never leave."

No. It's a humanitarian medical evacuation. Temporary. Clinical. Case by case. That's it.

And, shock horror, this is not the first time the government of the United Kingdom has seen fit to support paediatric care for children involved in a warzone.

In March 2022, twenty-one Ukrainian children received life-saving cancer treatment in England after being brought over by the UK government with the support of Polish authorities and clinicians. The children and their immediate family members landed in England and were triaged by NHS clinicians before being sent to NHS hospitals to continue their care. The vital and in many cases lifesaving cancer treatment was provided free of charge by the health service.

As then-Health Secretary Sajid Javid said:

"I am proud that the UK is offering lifesaving medical care to these Ukrainian children, who have been forced out of their home country by the Russian invasion while undergoing medical treatment."

And as much as I have deep trust issues with Tory governments and ministers, he was not wrong. This was a good thing.

It’s also worth noting that there were very few complaints or consternations about "secret resettlement schemes" then.

Funny how that works, right.

"Why are we taking in their children when British children are suffering?"

Because that framing is grim to the point of cruelty. These children aren't barging past some mythical British kid on a gurney, they're going into specialist wards with ringfenced beds. More fundamentally, though, this argument displays a spectacular misunderstanding of just how the health service actually works.

The NHS operates on different levels of care – primary (your GP), secondary (your consultant specialist), and tertiary (the highly specialised stuff like neurosurgery, organ transplants, or paediatric intensive care).

The children who are being considered for evacuation to the UK need highly specialist tertiary care at places like Great Ormond Street or The Christie in Manchester, specialist burns units, complex reconstructive surgery centres or rare cancer treatments.

These aren't the same services that most British children use day-to-day. A child from Gaza needing facial reconstruction surgery isn't taking a slot away from a British child who needs their tonsils out or a broken arm set.

The capacity constraints in the NHS aren't about beds for children with catastrophic war injuries - there simply aren't that many cases requiring that particular level of specialist intervention.

The main problems we face in the UK on a day-to-day are in routine care, access to community care, staffing, and the cascading effects of years and years of underfunding. A specialist burns unit treating a child with third-degree injuries covering 60% of their body, or a paediatric oncologist taking a patient with soft-tissue sarcoma on their list just isn't the reason your GP appointment is three weeks away.

And I hate to break it to the trolls, but compassion isn’t supposed to work like a gas meter. Treating one group of children doesn't magically switch off the lights for another. You don't look at a kid with burns down to the bone and say, "Sorry mate, can't help you, little Oliver in Stoke has glue ear." Medicine doesn’t work that way. Moral bankruptcy on the other hand, does.

"Why aren't hospitals in the region treating them instead of dumping them on us?"

That’s the thing - they are and they have been. Egypt has taken in 3,995 patients, the UAE 1,387, Qatar 970 and Turkey 437. Doctors from right across the region have been patching up more adult and paediatric patients than they can possibly handle.

Before the war, between 50 and 100 patients left Gaza every day for treatment - since October 7, that daily average has dropped to 11. The restrictions on goods entering Gaza and heavy fighting have crippled the already fragile health system, leaving it unable to provide even basic services to Gazans. At the same time, Israel has stopped admitting Gazans for treatment in Israel or permitting them to reach hospitals in the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

There comes a time, though, where the complexity of the injuries just cannot be managed there, and for treatment of that level, you need a Great Ormond Street or its equivalents across Europe.

It’s also completely disingenuous to imply that the UK is carrying this alone. Severely ill Palestinians have been evacuated to other countries since the start of the war, including more than 180 adults and children to Italy. France has evacuated 23 children for treatment. Spain took in 16 children last year.

This is an international effort because the hospitals nearest Gaza are completely overwhelmed, and because some conditions need world-class tertiary care that we are extremely fortunate to have access to in the United Kingdom and Europe.

So no, they are not being "dumped." They are being triaged, stabilised, and when local hospitals can't cope, moved to where they can potentially receive the level of care that’s not available locally.

"Aren't we just rewarding Hamas by giving special treatment to Palestinian kids?"

This is one of those arguments so grotesque I almost don't want to dignify it.

A six-year-old with third-degree burns is not Hamas.

A child who has lost both legs and half his family is not Hamas.

A little boy who was diagnosed with advanced leukaemia is not Hamas.

They are children. That's it.

We don't refuse to treat Ukrainian children because we disagree with Zelenskyy's policies.

We didn't withhold care from Bosnian kids because of tensions in the Balkans. Medical ethics does not work on a system of collective punishment where you are in any way or form willing to let children suffer because you dislike their government, especially when those children had zero say in choosing that government and are themselves victims of the violence.

If you really, honestly believe that a child with advanced clinical needs is secretly part of some great jihadist plot, then maybe the problem isn't the child, or Hamas, or even Gaza. Maybe the problem is your brain. Because if your political ideology insists that you see enemy combatants in hospital beds full of injured and ill paediatric patients, you've crossed a line from disagreement into something much, much darker.

"How do we even know these kids are really injured? Could be fake sob stories."

Because every referral is verified, documented, and signed off by doctors.

Not politicians.

Not campaigners.

Not Instagrammers with a cause.

The WHO vets the cases submitted to them. UK clinical teams check them for clinical appropriateness. These are kids with very real medical files, very real x-rays, very real limbs missing.

The children selected for evacuation require highly specialist tertiary care that cannot be provided locally. These aren't cases where you can fake the paperwork or stage some photos. The medical evidence is forensic, the need is urgent, and the expertise required is so specialised that only a handful of centres globally can provide it.

If your instinct on hearing "this child has catastrophic burns" is to shout "FAKE!", then you've essentially crossed over into Sandy Hook truther territory. Which is not an argument, it’s a pathology.

"Why should hard-working British taxpayers foot the bill for this?"

Because the bill is minuscule compared to what we spend daily, and because the alternative is letting kids die when we could have helped. It really is that stark.

The current government scheme is planned to bring a few handfuls of critically ill Palestinian children to the UK for NHS treatment - children selected according to need by doctors and thoroughly vetted according to the above. This builds on the work already being done by charities like Project Pure Hope and Islamic Relief, who have been privately funding evacuations at no (zero, nothing) cost to the NHS. Medical volunteers created these organisations specifically to facilitate treatment for Palestinian children, and they've spent months, and in some cases years, securing approvals through charitable contributions.

There is a serious and urgent need for some perspective. All the shouting that we see from Rupert Lowe and his hangers on is literally about a few dozen children in the government scheme, not tens of thousands.

The NHS already has budgets for humanitarian care and provisions for exceptional humanitarian cases where treatment cannot wait until the patient returns home. And if you can stomach billions blown on unusable PPE, write-offs for mates of ministers, or tax breaks for oil companies, then don't suddenly clutch your pearls over a handful of life-saving operations for children who would otherwise not see their next birthday.

And so I come back, hesitantly, to Rupert Lowe, raging at the world again.

What he’s raging at in this case isn’t policy, or ideology, or some great existential threat to Britain. It’s children. Children with catastrophic injuries, who have already lost more than most of us could bear, being given a shot at life.

If that’s what you’ve chosen as your hill to die on, then perhaps the NHS isn’t the thing that’s broken. Perhaps it’s your empathy. And while Rupert fumes on the internet, fifty children will hopefully find themselves in wards where care, compassion and decency still matter.

That, in the end, is the story here.

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No One Is Safe. Not Even Here.