Two young girls from Gaza have arrived in the UK, the first Palestinian children in need of specialist medical treatment to be evacuated to the country, over a year and a half into a war that has devastated Gaza's healthcare system.

Rama, 12, and Ghena, five, travelled to the UK from Egypt last week and will be treated in the private wings of leading hospitals in London, through a project funded entirely by charitable donations. 

"We were so scared. We were living in tents and shrapnel from air strikes used to fall on us," Rama, who has a lifelong bowel condition and needs an urgent operation, told the BBC.

"Mum used to suffer so much going to hospitals while bombs were falling and would stand in long queues just to get me a strip of pills. Here I'll get treatment and get better and be just like any other girl."

Ghena will be treated for fluid pressing up against her optic nerve. Without an operation, she could lose sight in her left eye.