Glasgow student drives ambulance from Glasgow to Gaza to assist relief efforts

A student from the Scottish city of Glasgow is driving an ambulance to Gaza, in an effort to assist humanitarian relief efforts in the besieged strip.

After buying a second-hand ambulance in January, Umran Ali Javaid, a master’s student at Glasgow’s Caledonian university, set out in recent weeks to make his way to the embattled Gaza Strip.

Having only recently received approval from authorities in Israel and Egypt – including from the Israeli occupation’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs – he aims to deliver the ambulance to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which remains the largest humanitarian organisation working within Gaza.

Starting from Glasgow, Javaid’s plan was to catch a ferry from Dover to France, then travel across Europe into Turkiye, from where he will catch a ship to Egypt’s Al Arish port before driving to the Rafah border at the south of Gaza.

Speaking to Middle East Monitor on Friday, Javaid revealed that he was in Italy after driving over 1,500 miles from Glasgow. “I went through the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Switzerland. The ambulance will hopefully be in Gaza after a few days’ time once I board a ship to Egypt and drive to the Rafah border”, he confirmed.

At Rafah, the ambulance “will be handed over and donated to the UN agency UNRWA to help save innocent civilians and those that are injured. I am in constant contact with the Egyptian authorities and have approval from [Israel’s] COGAT for the ambulance to enter Gaza”.

READ: Scotland: firefighters donate fire appliance to Gaza

He noted that the ambulance “has a portable neonatal ventilator on board as I couldn’t get this story out of my mind”, referring to the newborn babies who have been some of the most tragic victims of Israel’s assault on Gaza over the past five months, particularly amid reports and footage of decomposing bodies of babies in an abandoned children’s hospital in December.

In comments to Scottish newspaper The Herald last month, Javaid stated that “During war innocent civilians, especially children, need help and the ambulance can transport those that are injured and infants as it is equipped with a neo-natal ventilator.”

Highlighting the medical and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, he said “British ambulances are really well-quipped to help patients needing immediate medical support and right now hospitals and aid agencies need a lot of help to assist civilians. That said, one ambulance can only help a few hundred people in the coming months which is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed.”

This is not Javaid’s first drive to Gaza, or in fact his only donation of an ambulance to a war zone, but he has reportedly delivered 40 other second-hand ambulances to conflict areas in previous years, including Burma, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and most recently Ukraine back in September.

READ: Gaza hospital like ‘open-air concentration camp,’ says French doctor