A British charity has written to the prime minister and foreign secretary, urging them to allow seriously ill children from Gaza into the UK to receive life-saving medical treatment.

Warning: This article contains images readers may find distressing

The co-founder of Project Pure Hope told Sky News it was way past the time for words.

“Now, we need action,” Omar Dinn said.

He’s identified two children inside Gaza who urgently need help and is appealing to the UK government to issue visas as a matter of urgency.

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Britain has taken only two patients from Gaza for medical treatment in 20 months of Israeli bombardment.

“Most of the people affected by this catastrophe that’s unfolding in Gaza are children,” he continued. “And children are the most vulnerable.

“They have nothing to do with the politics, and we really just need to see them for what they are.

“They are children, just like my children, just like everybody’s children in this country – and we have the ability to help them.”

Sky News has been sent video blogs from British surgeons working in Gaza right now which show the conditions and difficulties they’re working under.

They prepare for potential immediate evacuation whilst facing long lists, mainly of children, needing life-saving emergency treatment day after day.

Dr Victoria Rose told us: “Every time I come, I say it’s really bad, but this is on a completely different scale now. It’s mass casualties. It’s utter carnage.

“We are incapable of getting through this volume. We don’t have the personnel. We don’t have the medical supplies. And we really don’t have the facilities.

“We are the last standing hospital in the south of Gaza. We really are on our knees now.”

One of her patients is three-year-old Hatem, who was badly burned when an Israeli airstrike hit the family apartment.

His pregnant mother and father were both killed, leaving him an orphan. He has 35 percent burns on his small body.

“It’s a massive burn for a little guy like this,” Dr Rose says. “He’s so adorable. His eyelids are burnt. His hands are burnt. His feet are burnt.”

Hatem’s grandfather barely leaves his hospital bedside. Hatem Senior told us: “What did these children do wrong to suffer such injuries? To be burned and bombed? We ask God to grant them healing.”

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The second child identified by the charity is Karam, who, aged one, is trying to survive in a tent in deeply unhygienic surroundings with a protruding intestine.

He’s suffering from a birth defect called Hirschsprung disease, which could be easily operated on with the right skills and equipment – unavailable to him in Gaza right now.

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Karam’s mother Manal told our Gaza camera crew: “No matter how much I describe how much my son is suffering, I wouldn’t be able to describe it enough. I swear I am constantly crying.”

Children are among the bulk of casualties – some 16,000 have been killed, according to the latest figures from local health officials – and make up the majority of those being operated on, according to the British surgical team on the ground.

What’s unfolding in the Palestinian village of Ras al-Ayn is more than a land dispute – according to human rights groups, it is the systematic displacement of an entire community.

Activists on the ground report a surge in violence and intimidation by Israeli settlers aimed at driving Palestinian families from their homes.

Footage captured by Rachel Abramovitz, a member of the group Looking The Occupation In The Eye, shows activists trying to block settlers from seizing control of the village centre.

“They gradually invade the community and expand. The goal is to terrorise people, to make them flee,” Ms Abramovitz said.

Our visit comes as Israel said it would establish 22 new Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank – including new settlements and the legalisation of outposts already built without government authorisation.

The settler movement traces back to 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights during the Six-Day War.

Settlements began as small, often unofficial outposts. Over the decades, they’ve grown into towns and cities with state-provided infrastructure, roads, and security.

Today, 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in communities considered illegal under international law – a designation Israel disputes.

Since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 and Israel’s subsequent 19-month military bombardment of Gaza, violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank has escalated sharply.

According to the UN and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, the overwhelming number of these attacks are carried out with impunity, further pressuring Palestinians to flee.

Salaam Ka’abneh, a lifelong resident of the Bedouin village of Ras al-Ayn in the Jordan Valley, says his family has lived on the land for more than 50 years. He fears they could be forced to leave.

Mr Ka’abneh said: “About a year and four months ago, settlers cut off our access to water and grazing land. They also stole more than 2,000 sheep from us in the Tel Al-Auja compound. We face daily assaults, day and night.

“They terrorise our children and women, throwing stones, firing bullets, and creating chaos with their vehicles. We are under siege. We no longer have access to pasture or water, and our sheep remain caged.”

Footage from the area shows settlers driving freely through Palestinian communities, some armed.

While the Israeli army officially governs Area C of the West Bank, where Ras al-Ayn is located, human rights groups say settler violence almost always goes unchecked.

Under international law, an occupying power is obligated to protect civilians under its control. But Sarit Michaeli of B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, says Israel is failing to uphold its responsibility.

“Israel doesn’t hold settlers accountable. On the contrary – settlers know that if they act violently, they’ll receive support from all branches of the government. There’s full impunity. In fact, it’s more accurate to say settlers function as a branch of the government.

“It’s daylight robbery of land – sanctioned by Israeli authorities,” Michaeli continues.

“And it amounts to ethnic cleansing – displacing large parts of the Palestinian population to make the area available for Israeli use.”

To understand more, we travelled to a hilltop outpost occupied by settlers overlooking Salaam’s village. But we did not get far. Our car was quickly surrounded, and the atmosphere turned hostile.

It was clear: we were not welcome. We left with no answers but with a deeper understanding of the fear these Palestinian communities live with daily.

International pressure is growing. The British government recently imposed sanctions on several settlers, including Daniella Weiss.

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Known as the ‘godmother’ of the settler movement, Weiss has been a key figure in expanding settlements across the West Bank.

“There will never be a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Never,” Weiss declares. “We annex with facts on the ground. The goal is to block any possibility of a Palestinian state in the heartland of Israel.

“If Netanyahu wanted to stop me, he could.”

The Israeli government calls allegations of ethnic cleansing “baseless and without foundation”.

But human rights groups argue that what’s happening in the West Bank has gone far beyond creeping annexation.

Palestinian land is rapidly being consumed by settlements, military zones, and settler outposts – shrinking the space in which a future Palestinian state might one day exist.

You can watch a Sky News special programme on the conflict in Gaza on TV and mobile, at 9pm UK time, on Thursday.