Israel/Gaza

Lord Morrow Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morrow (DUP)]

My Lords, the massacre of Israeli civilians and the taking of more than 2,000 hostages ranging from babies to a Holocaust survivor on 7 October, together with the sustained rocket attacks on to the State of Israel and at sea have shocked the whole world. The attacks were clearly planned to coincide with the Sabbath nearest to the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur war, when Israel was attacked and invaded by surrounding nations. Of course, today’s attacks continue.

This conflict is distinctive, because it began with a deliberate massacre of civilians and is the result of a general strategy that, as plans found on the bodies of dead Hamas combatants reveal, involves the deliberate targeting of civilians. Thus, the civilians affected are not victims of so-called collateral damage, where they are killed or injured accidentally, but the result of their being the express and deliberate target. Of course, that makes sense, because according to Hamas, Israel has no right to exist; and if it has no right to exist, plainly no one in Israel, be they combatants or non-combatants, has a right to exist.

Israel’s reaction, by contrast, has been quite different. It has a massive challenge, because the only way in which it can stop Hamas is by counterattacking Gazan territory to remove Hamas—a territory that, as in any war, has a far larger civilian than combatant population. Rather than asking its troops to target Gazan civilians, the Israeli army is doing the opposite. It is urging its troops to avoid civilians. It is sending warnings about the areas that it intends to target and is encouraging civilians to move. Some people might respond by saying, “Well, why should they move? It is wrong to ask them to do so.” However, if we are to adopt that position, we are effectively saying one of two things: either we are saying that they should stay put and Israel has no right to defend its population and should not seek to take out Hamas and should just let the rocket and other attacks continue; or we are saying that Israel should attack to take out Hamas, and if civilians are killed because they remained in target areas, then so be it. Neither approach is credible. The only credible approach is what Israel is actually doing.

I am troubled that some spokespeople in surrounding countries that were combatants against Israel 50 years ago are failing to make these critical distinctions and concerned about the potential for things to escalate. This is no doubt what Hamas had in mind in its decision to choose the 50th anniversary of the nearest Sabbath to the Yom Kippur war, a conflict that engulfed much of the Middle East. In this context, we all have a responsibility to be clear about the distinctions between Israel’s non-combatant civilian policy and the policy of Hamas.

I am the same age as the State of Israel, and I cannot imagine what it must have been like to have been invaded in 1948—less than four years after the end of the Holocaust—and again in 1967, 1973, 1982, and so on, and now this. I am very pleased to stand today with the people of Israel. I think it is my duty and responsibility.

I am also very mindful of the innocent Gazan population into which Hamas embeds itself. There is plainly a desperate need for humanitarian relief that gets to where it is needed and not into the hands of Hamas. We are all indebted to those brave people working night and day to secure safe passage of the aid to the civilian population. They have, I am sure, the support of everyone in this House.