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LONDON: The British government must bring sick and injured Palestinian children from Gaza to the UK “without delay,” a group of MPs has said.

The cross-party group of 96 parliamentarians made the appeal in a letter to senior government ministers, .

Children in the Palestinian enclave are at risk of imminent death, and any barriers preventing their evacuation to Britain must be removed, they said.

Responding to Gaza’s “decimated” healthcare system requires adequate funding and a detailed timeline for child evacuations, the MPs added.

UN children’s charity UNICEF has said that more than 50,000 Palestinian children have been killed or injured since the beginning of the Gaza war in late 2023.

The medical and humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave has reached “horrific proportions,” said the MPs’ letter, which was coordinated by Dr. Simon Opher, a Labour MP and GP.

Signatories to the letter, addressing the health, home, and foreign secretaries, said they were working with Medecins sans Frontieres to expedite the evacuation of injured and ill Palestinian children to Britain.

The children and their families must be allowed to claim asylum after their treatment is completed, the letter said.

The UK Home Office previously said that biometric checks would be carried out before Palestinian children and their carers travel to the UK, a decision that was questioned by the letter’s signatories.

Plans to evacuate seriously ill or injured children from Gaza were being carried out “at pace,” the government said earlier in August.

A spokesperson said: “We are accelerating plans to evacuate children from Gaza who require urgent medical care, including bringing them to the UK for specialist treatment where that is the best option.”

Several hundred Palestinian children are expected to be evacuated as part of the scheme.

Since late 2023, the UK has channeled funding toward the treatment of injured and seriously ill Palestinians in hospitals across the Middle East.

Liz Harding, of MSF’s UK branch, welcomed the MPs’ letter and called on the government to waive its biometric visa requirement.

Britain must “urgently act on its commitment by creating a dedicated, publicly funded pathway based on clinical need, not bureaucracy,” she added.

KABUL: Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader of the Taliban, has ordered his ministers to remove the “acting” designation from their titles, a move experts say indicates the establishment of a permanent Afghan government.

Weeks after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021, the group formed a caretaker government consisting almost entirely of senior figures and without female representation, which has remained in place ever since.

As Afghanistan marks the fourth anniversary on Friday since the Taliban takeover of the country, the group’s reclusive chief, who rules largely from Kandahar, told his officials to stop using “caretaker” in their roles.

“All ministers and the cabinet of the Islamic Emirate should not use the word caretaker in their titles,” Akhundzada said in a statement.

When the Taliban first announced a caretaker administration it was framed as a temporary set-up before the country established an official and inclusive government that included women and members of Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic groups.

Afghans were expecting a voting system to establish a permanent government that would include their voices, whether it was in the form of elections or a “loya jirga,” a grand assembly traditionally held to reach a consensus on important political issues.

“But now that the supreme leader (has) instructed that the current government is official, from a legal perspective the supreme leader’s decree constitutes a law for the Taliban government, replacing the constitution,” Abdul Saboor Mubariz, board member of the Center for Strategic and Regional Studies in Kabul, told Arab News.

“The political implication of this decision could be that there is no hope for major change in the present form of government.”

The initial announcement of a caretaker government, he added, was in the hope of gaining official recognition by the international community. 

With the exception of Russia in July, no other nation has formally recognized Taliban rule since the group seized power in 2021.

“But now they (have) realized that no big progress has been made in that regard so they want to make the current government permanent,” Mubariz said. 

Naseer Ahmad Nawidy, a political science professor at Salam University in Kabul, said the removal of “caretaker” in ministerial titles could mean higher authority for Taliban officials.

“(It’s) something positive. The ministries in Kabul need to have (a) free hand and more authority in their relevant tasks considering the expertise required for each sector,” he told Arab News.

The Taliban also used the term initially to mean that “the ministers were only temporary and that the actual authority was only with the supreme leader in Kandahar,” Nawidy added.

“It also has another message to the executive officials: that no one should be above obeying and all decrees of the leader must be implemented without any questions,” he said.

“The new announcement is an indication that the Islamic Emirate wants to show that the government is fully established.”