Debate on Gaza

House of Commons

15th January 2009

I want to use the six minutes available to me to report on a recent visit that I made with European parliamentarians to Gaza, and to try and correct some of the propaganda and untruths that have been spread across the airwaves and that have been repeated here in the Chamber today.

We visited in early November, and we found Gaza to be besieged, with people suffering acute shortages because Israel had closed the crossing-points. Schools lacked paper, pencils and pens, and there were shortages of food, drinking water, drugs, medical equipment and virtually everything else. As a consequence, nearly half the children and most of the women in Gaza are anaemic. The main hospital was under great strain even before the present terrible bombardment began, and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross testified yesterday that it is now in an absolutely terrible condition.

There is also a terrible smell of sewage along the sea front, because Israel will not allow the importation of the parts needed to build an essential sewage treatment plant. Civil engineers are available and money has been committed, but Israel blocks the project, with the result that raw sewage goes into the sea. Also, the Israeli navy fires on and attacks fishermen if they go beyond a few miles out. Hungry people therefore eat polluted fish and are constantly sick.

As we left, Israel blocked the import of EU-supplied fuel, with the result that the power plant—which had already been partly bombed—had to stop operation and most of Gaza was cast into darkness. Thus, the people of Gaza were besieged and suffering even before the terrible bombardment began on 27 December.

The present problems all flow from the response by Israel, the EU and the UK to the Palestinian people daring to vote for a Hamas Government in January 2006. Those elections were monitored by large numbers of international observers, all of whom said that they were free and fair. After the elections, however, the UK and EU adopted an approach that cravenly supported extreme Israeli and, of course, US policy. They refused to recognise the properly elected Hamas Government and instead set out to divide and rule the Palestinian people.

That approach was justified by the claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation. The claim has been repeated today, but what does it mean? As the hon. Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) said earlier, international law holds that people in an occupied territory are entitled to resist occupation. They are not entitled to target civilians—no power is, although Israel is never held to account for what it does. In fact, Gaza’s home-made rockets cannot be targeted accurately, so they illegally injure civilians. That is wrong and has been denounced by everyone.

However, we need to be clear about proportionality, which is one the conditions of the international rules of war. According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, in the seven years between the first of those primitive rockets being launched and the start of the current massacre, the rockets killed 13 Israelis and one foreigner. That is terrible but, in the same period, Israel killed 4,781 Palestinians: nearly 3,000 of them were in Gaza, and one in seven of them was a child. How can the rockets justify the current slaughter? It is all regrettable, but the slaughter is not justified by the rockets.

It is disgraceful that the claim that it does has been repeated constantly in this Chamber.
In addition, there was a ceasefire negotiated through Egypt. Hamas held to it for five months, but Israel breached it in an amazing assault in early November and by its intensification of the blockade. The fact that Hamas agreed to the ceasefire and held to it has been written out of the picture and is never brought to public attention. So all these claims that the rockets justify the attack or that Hamas would not agree a ceasefire are untrue. Just as in the case of the Iraq war, the slaughter is justified by a constant litany of lies. That is one of the things that is enraging young Muslims in our country and across the world.

Once we were in Gaza, we met the elected parliamentarians who were not in prison—there were pictures in the Parliament of all those who had been imprisoned by the Israelis—and we had detailed discussions with Prime Minister Haniya. He said that the west had asked three things of them before it would recognise Hamas’s authority and negotiate with them: first, to recognise Israel; secondly, to halt violence; and thirdly, to accept all previous agreements negotiated with the PLO. He said that Hamas had responded by saying, first, that if a Palestinian state was established on 1967 boundaries, they would recognise the agreement and declare a long-term ceasefire. It has already been made clear that that is their position. That is another thing that is lied about.

Secondly, Hamas had negotiated and held to a ceasefire. That, therefore, dealt with the claim about violence. Thirdly, on previous agreements, notably Oslo, which it thought a very bad agreement—and I agree; it undermined the position of the Palestinian people—it recognised that the agreement was properly reached by the PLO, which had the authority to do so at the time. So it seems to me that Hamas has met the demands of the west, yet still no negotiations and no contact occur. Instead, the present massacre is allowed to take place.

Why will the UK and the EU not recognise Hamas? Why will the UK not hold Israel to international law? Why do we not take action under the Geneva convention? We are completely unbalanced. On the basis of international law, there could be a settlement. The UK and the EU allow Israel to break the law, so there cannot be peace and a settlement. The trouble will go on indefinitely and we will all reap the wreckage of it.

Clare Short MP