Ceasefire in Gaza

Claire Hanna Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

Members across the Chamber have set out, in moving terms, the context and the consequences of the last few months in Gaza, so I will not try to capture it.

I worked for relief and development agencies for 10 years before being elected to this place, and I never encountered a humanitarian context as hellish as the people of Gaza are experiencing. Our constituents are watching in desperation and distress, and they feel powerless to the point of complicity. That is not the main issue, but it has consequences for their faith in politics and international law, and I want to give voice to the feelings of dread that people feel when the images they have seen on their screens become permanently etched in their mind.

I feel the same way. I look at my sweet, smiling, innocent six-year-old daughter, and I see a six-year-old trapped in a car for days, with nobody listening to her cries, surrounded by the bodies of all the people she loves. Those stories will never leave people.

Worse, people who express basic human emotion and solidarity with people who face the unimaginable are being met with slurs and distortions. They are smeared as being pro-Hamas and slurred as being antisemitic, as we heard in this Chamber just a few moments ago. Like most of my constituents, I stand in full solidarity with the victims of the wicked Hamas attacks of 7 October. Those vile, indefensible attacks were carried out by a cynical organisation that has not allowed the people of Gaza to vote for a generation, but the attacks do not justify the horrors that have followed.

I defend Israel’s right to exist. I stand in solidarity with Jewish people here and around the world, including those standing against the far-right Netanyahu Government and their excesses throughout the last summer. Netanyahu is a man who, in word and deed, has repudiated the two- state solution that many of us in this Chamber advocate, and that is the only possible outcome that does not condemn the region to years of this nightmare.

Comparisons between the middle east and Northern Ireland are shallow, and I avoid making them. The one lesson that can be learned is that the first step is to stop the killing. Those who ask for a permanent ceasefire are setting an impossibly high bar. Even when the paramilitaries were dragged to that point in Northern Ireland, it took a decade for their ceasefires to be made permanent.

We need to stop the bombs and the rockets, we need to release the hostages, we need to release the aid, and then we need to work every day to make it sustainable. Only politics can do that. There is no military solution here, and there never was. I do not care which amendment is passed tonight and I do not care about the form of words, so long as this House sends a clear message calling for international momentum towards an end to this slaughter and a pathway to a just and lasting settlement. Israel has failed to reach its objectives. If we do not support a ceasefire now, when will we?