Ceasefire in Gaza

Claudia Webbe Excerpts

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israeli has killed, seriously injured or maimed well over 100,000 people in Gaza since 7 October, the vast majority of them civilians, and women and children. More than 1,000 children have lost limbs, and many have had to undergo amputations without anaesthetic. Whole families and generations have been wiped out, and just this week the United Nations Human Rights Office said it believes that Israeli soldiers have engaged in arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killing and sexual violence, including the rape and execution of women and girls, and intentionally and publicly humiliated and degraded others. Israel itself has posted videos of its humiliation of civilian men.

Israel did not even pause for breath in its slaughter in Gaza when the International Court of Justice put it on trial for genocide and ordered it to protect Palestinian lives. Yet our Government continue to enable and assist the Israeli military. The UK Government must explain why they have issued at least 27 arms licences to Israel in the last 137 days—British-made bombs and weapons killing civilians in Gaza. The UN World Health Organisation and others have been warning for weeks that famine and disease in Gaza are starting to kill more civilians than bombs and bullets. The health system in Gaza has been bombed into collapse. Famine is now in Gaza, and 80% of the world’s hungriest people are in that tiny enclave. Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Palestinians are forced to eat grass just to survive. Palestinians in Gaza are forced to grind animal feed into flour just to survive. Cutting off funding for UNRWA, the United Nations aid organisation for Palestine, is a death sentence. Only a fraction of the bare minimum for survival is being allowed through in aid. Israel is bombing Rafah, where it drove almost the whole population for their supposed safety. Israel says that it plans a full invasion, which would trigger a catastrophe that would dwarf the horrors we have seen so far.

The UK Government are under an obligation under international law to do everything in their power to stop genocide, yet they have not taken a meaningful step to do so, and they will not even call for an immediate ceasefire to end the devastation. We must call for an immediate ceasefire, and it is ludicrous that we are engaged in collective punishment. Collective punishment is a war crime. Forceable transfer and slaughter are war crimes. We therefore need the motion that the SNP has put forward today, which calls for an end to these war crimes and an immediate ceasefire. I support it.