Warning: This report contains details and images that some may find distressing.
In summer 2024, nobody believed Sadeel would live to see her first birthday.
The 11-month-year-old urgently needed a liver transplant – something that wasn’t available to her in the war-ravaged hospitals of Gaza.
But she was granted a rare evacuation to Egypt on medical grounds, arranged by British charity Children Not Numbers following ITV News reporting on her story.
She travelled with her father Tamer, who donated part of his own liver to save his daughter, but her mother Huda was left behind.
A few weeks ago, the family was finally reunited, and they are now living together in one of Gaza’s few undamaged buildings.
“The painful thing is that Sadeel came back not knowing her mother,” Huda told ITV News.
“My daughter doesn’t know her own mother. When I first held her in my arms she seemed to be in shock. She doesn’t know me,” she said.
Phone and video calls were not enough to maintain a normal mother-daughter connection during the two years they were apart.
“How could I hug my daughter, or kiss my daughter, through a phone call?”
Before the evacuation Sadeel was still breastfeeding and her mother held her constantly in hospital to ensure she could breathe.
While Sadeel’s family are now back together and she is much healthier than when we last told her story, she has only been given five months’ worth of medication, leaving her parents concerned that her health could deteriorate again.
Because of her liver transplant Sadeel needs lifelong medication to prevent her body from rejecting the new organ.
“The medication and the essential tests aren’t available in Gaza. I spoke to several medical providers but none of them could promise that they could bring in the drugs she needs,” Tamer said.
But Sadeel is one of the lucky ones.
“All the other children who were with us in the same hospital ward passed away,” Huda said. “I can still hear the heart monitors beating. My heart would beat in time with them.
“When the power went out and the ventilators stopped the children would die. Three children died in that room when I was there. ”
At least 127 children have already died awaiting medical evacuation, according to Children Not Numbers, and those are only the official figures by one organisation – the real number is likely much higher.
Dozens more children like Sadeel could die if they are not evacuated.
There are 66 children currently registered with the charity who require critical evacuation, co-founder Somaya Ouazzani said, and the charity regularly receives videos from families appealing for their help.
“That means today, ASAP, their life literally depends on getting out of Gaza. And we do not have the resources to be able to fund that treatment.”
Unfortunately the charity doesn’t have the means to help everybody.
“There are thousands of Sadeels in Gaza, there are so many children that could have survived,” Somaya warns.
One of the children we had intended to feature in this piece died before it was published, while another died last week – both because there weren’t the resources to evacuate them from Gaza to seek medical treatment.
“There are so many children that could have survived. The sorts of illnesses children have in Gaza are the kind where every single day counts and once they get past a certain point they are too unstable to evacuate, and to be honest at that point it’s just a steady demise,” Somaya says.
“It’s really difficult because we’re essentially being asked to plug a gap, a bit like a parallel state or, fill in the gaps that governments have not,” she added.
The UK formally agreed to accept evacuated Gazan children in July 2025, and since then a total of 10 sick children and their immediate family members have been brought over to receive specialist treatment in NHS hospitals.
In June this year the UK government announced new evacuations of critically ill children who needed specialist medical support available in Britain.
On September 4, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said that the UK government has “got to act and act more decisively that [it] has”, having spoken to people who have been on the ground in Gaza.
“It was horrific what is unfolding … medicines being blocked, children dying while waiting for vital life saving treatment”.
In response to the video Israel’s foreign ministry said “there are no restrictions whatsoever on the entry of medicines into the Gaza Strip, and … no medicines are being blocked”.
The World Health Organisation said on August 28 that 13,237 people have been evacuated from Gaza on medical grounds, including 6,276 children, since October 7, 2023.
The organisation’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said thousands more Gazans are awaiting medical evacuations.
“Medical evacuations give people in need of urgent care a chance of survival. To ensure timely treatment for patients, medical evacuations require sustained access through multiple crossing routes,” he wrote on X.
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