Seeds of Solidarity: A night at London's Savoy honouring Palestinian women and healthcare workers

In just under two weeks, London's legendary The Savoy — whose glamorous guest list has ranged from Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to Hollywood icons like Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra — will host a fundraising cultural gala for the Health Workers for Palestine Solidarity Fund (HW4P), the only Palestinian-led initiative dedicated to rebuilding Gaza's healthcare system, supporting health-worker families, and training doctors to return and serve their communities.

The upcoming Seeds of Solidarity gala will build on last year's Voices of Solidarity and promises an immersive, multi-sensory evening celebrating the resilience of Palestinian women — mothers, midwives, doctors, artists, and community organisers — who continue to protect life, land, and dignity under extraordinary conditions.

Through storytelling, music, art, and testimony, the night will explore themes of female leadership, reproductive justice, memory, and survival.

Guiding guests through the evening will be Lina Hadid, a lawyer, lobbyist, humanitarian, and long-time HW4P supporter. Also, the cousin of models Bella and Gigi Hadid, she will present a collection of Palestinian-customised luxury pieces that she has commissioned and donated, highlighting her long-standing practice of using fashion to raise awareness about the Palestinian cause.

Items being donated include handbags and leather goods by A.P.C., Jacquemus, Cartier, Celine, and Ganni, each hand-painted with 'Free Palestine' by Paris-based street artist Denver (132 Paris), which, as Lina puts it, reflect her long-standing practice of using fashion as a form of non-verbal communication and peaceful resistance. 

"What is happening in Palestine is not only the loss of life, but an attempt to erase a people and their history. Palestinians hold on to what cannot be taken by force: poetry, embroidery, food, and memory," Lina says. 

"These acts say, 'We are still here'. Of course, I am 100 percent focused on achieving an immediate ceasefire in Palestine; however, I still need to get dressed every day. So, here we go…" she adds. 

Art will also take centre stage, with one of the evening's highlights being a fine art auction featuring works donated by artists including Sir Antony Gormley, Brian Eno, Lisa Brice, Lydia Blakeley, Hassan Hajjaj, Mona Hatoum, Caroline Walker, Sam Durant, Alison Wilding, and Rana Begum.

The auction will be led by British-Palestinian curator Zayna Al-Saleh, who has previously raised over $1.4 million through her Voices of Palestine auctions, and will be auctioneered by Hugh Edmeades, former chairman of Christie's South Kensington.

"Art carries truth across borders when politics fails," Zayna notes.

Another highlight will be Photosymphony: A Live Plant Orchestra for Palestine, a world-travelled installation created by internationally acclaimed artist and Lady Gaga collaborator Millie Brown, with a scent-scape by perfumer Beckielou Brown.

For the first time, the installation transforms the electrical frequencies of native Palestinian plants into a live, evolving soundscape that makes their hidden life force audible, while also bearing witness to environmental devastation — from the loss of za'atar to the uprooting of ancient olive trees — and offering a haunting tribute to Palestinian roots, memory, and resilience.

Music will similarly be central to the gala, with the London Arab Orchestra and the London Arab Women Choir, conducted by Basel Saleh, performing a fusion of traditional Middle Eastern melodies and contemporary orchestral sounds.

To date, the orchestra has performed at the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican, and last September's Together For Palestine concert at London's OVO Arena Wembley.

In 2025, they also collaborated with Gorillaz on their 25th anniversary tour and new album, blending Arabic musical expression with contemporary global pop.

Finally, not to be missed are the evening's keynote conversations, featuring a remarkable line-up of speakers.

Dr Victoria Rose, British consultant plastic and reconstructive surgeon and trustee of IDEALS; Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, world-renowned Palestinian plastic surgeon and Rector of the University of Glasgow; Amira Nimerawi, CEO of HW4P and impact specialist at the Palestinian Medical Relief Society; and Palestinian British filmmaker Farah Nabulsi, Oscar-nominated and BAFTA award-winning for The Teacher (2023), will come together to explore the destruction of Gaza's healthcare system, the experiences of Palestinian female medical workers on the frontlines, and what meaningful global solidarity looks like today.

Dr Victoria Rose will also share how her plans to revisit Gaza in late 2025, alongside dozens of other doctors, were blocked by Israeli authorities — highlighting the ongoing challenges faced by healthcare professionals in the region.

Centring Palestinian women

"Staging Seeds of Solidarity at The Savoy was a conscious act of reclamation," Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, founder and president of HW4P, tells The New Arab.

"Palestinian women — mothers, midwives, doctors, artists, and organisers — are too often marginalised, reduced to statistics, or framed only through suffering. This evening insists on something different: visibility, dignity, and recognition in a space historically associated with influence, culture, and power."

Dr Omar notes that, as a paediatric neurologist, he has spent his career caring for children and families during their most vulnerable moments.

"I know that behind every injured child is a mother, a sister, a midwife, a teacher — women whose labour and leadership hold communities together under impossible conditions. As an Arab doctor, I also understand how rarely our stories are told with dignity in Western institutions," he shares. 

"Bringing Palestinian women into one of London's most iconic venues is about saying: your lives, your leadership, and your culture belong at the centre of global conversations."

Reflecting on the gala's purpose, Omar explains that it is intended as an immersive, multi-sensory experience, moving beyond the format of a traditional fundraising dinner.

"Each element — from medical testimony and keynote conversations to music, scent, visual art, and food — reflects a different dimension of Palestinian women's lived realities: care, resistance, memory, reproductive justice, grief, and survival.

"As a clinician, I'm trained to listen to bodies and to stories — to understand how trauma lives not just in statistics, but in people. The testimonies of surgeons and frontline health workers ground the evening in lived truth. The Photosymphony installation connects that reality to land, ecology, and memory. Music gives emotional voice to what words alone cannot carry," he says. 

"Rather than separating 'culture' from 'crisis', we wanted to show how Palestinian women use creativity, care, and community as tools of survival."

Omar also stresses that meaningful solidarity goes beyond statements or symbolism.

"It requires sustained funding, political courage, and material support for those risking their lives to care for others. At a time when so many international organisations have been blocked from entering Gaza, supporting indigenous, Palestinian-led institutions has never been more important," he explains. 

"Groups like the Palestinian Medical Relief Society and the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children's Fund have deep roots in their communities, long-standing trust on the ground, and the lived expertise to respond to urgent needs while building long-term resilience."

Looking ahead, Omar emphasises that the gala's £1 million target will directly support these initiatives — from rebuilding clinics and assisting health-worker families to funding specialist training for doctors who will return to serve their communities.

"This is not aid imposed from outside, but solidarity rooted in local leadership and self-determination," Omar stresses.

A love letter to Palestine

Speaking specifically about adapting Photosymphony for the gala, Millie explains: "Each iteration of Photosymphony is conceived as a site-specific work, grounded in the ecology and cultural context of the place in which it is presented. I work primarily with native flora, allowing the land itself to become both collaborator and narrator. 

"For this edition, since we could not gather physically in Palestine, the aim was to bring its essence, strength, and beauty to London. The plants selected for the installation are all native to Palestine and carry deep cultural and symbolic meaning.

"The olive tree forms the central element of the work, standing as an ode to deep-rootedness, continuity, and the generations of families who have tended these trees with care and reverence. Olive trees in Palestine are not simply agricultural entities; they are living archives of memory, sustenance, and belonging," Millie tells The New Arab. 

"I also incorporated za'atar, a plant of profound cultural significance that has become politicised through the criminalisation of its foraging by Palestinians. Alongside this are sage, rosemary, and other indigenous plants that together create a visual and sensory landscape reminiscent of the Palestinian terrain."

On how the installation communicates Palestinian memory and environmental struggle, Millie adds: "Much of how this installation communicates cultural memory and environmental struggle operates through the senses rather than through overt intellectual framing. I am deeply interested in how feeling precedes cognition. I often say that frequency is a universal language, and that principle is central to this work.

"The soundscape is constructed as a layered tapestry of Palestinian life, drawing from field recordings made within Palestine. It functions as a dialogue between human presence and the natural world.

"Every day sounds are woven together: women singing, bees buzzing, the call to prayer interlaced with birdsong, including recordings of birds perched atop the separation wall. These pairings hold both beauty and rupture."

Regarding the immersive experience, she notes: "Photosymphony asks us to reconsider our relationship with nature — not as something separate from ourselves, but as an extension of our own bodies and survival systems. Humans are not outside the natural world; we are embedded within it, dependent on its health in ways we too often choose to forget.

"The devastation unfolding in Palestine today is not only a humanitarian catastrophe but also an environmental one. Entire bloodlines are being erased alongside ecosystems," Millie explains. 

"Agricultural land is being destroyed, water sources contaminated, soil poisoned by explosive remnants of war, and the air thick with particulate matter from sustained bombardment. These impacts do not end when the violence pauses — they persist for generations.

"Multiple analyses have estimated that the cumulative explosive force used in Gaza is equivalent to several Hiroshima-scale blasts in conventional explosive yield. While this comparison is not meant to be taken literally in terms of nuclear effects, it conveys the scale of environmental destruction," she continues. 

"The consequences are inseparable: when the land is poisoned, the water undrinkable, and the air unbreathable, human life inevitably suffers.

"I hope guests leave the event with a more holistic understanding that environmental collapse and human suffering are not parallel crises, but one and the same. I also hope to see more environmental voices speaking out on Palestine, recognising that this is a global ecological issue, not a geographically contained one," she concludes. 

Ultimately, Millie sees the work as a form of solidarity, describing it as a love letter to Palestine — to both its people and its land — and adding that while art cannot replace medical aid, it can create the cultural and emotional conditions for solidarity, acknowledging resilience and amplifying voices too often silenced.

As of December 2025, more than 1,700 health workers have been killed in Gaza, with hospitals reduced to rubble and hundreds of thousands of civilians left without basic care. HW4P has already raised £250,000 toward its £1 million target, and Seeds of Solidarity aims to bridge the remaining gap.

Stay tuned as The New Arab heads to the event with full coverage. Tickets are available here.

Zainab Mehdi is The New Arab's Associate Editor and researcher specialising in governance, development, and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa region 

Follow her on Instagram: @zaiamehdi_/@zainabmehdiwrites_