Situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

None of these solutions is entirely in our gift. We do not have the ability to wave a wand or send a gunboat or do all the things that Foreign Ministers might have done in centuries past. It comes down to really hard work and old-fashioned diplomacy. That is what my noble friend the Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister, other Ministers, my noble friend Lord Ahmad—who has been ceaselessly working on this—and the Diplomatic Service have been trying to draw together. We think we have a thread which can lead towards a solution. We have to be positive about this. If you just think of the world as it exists—my noble friend referred to 8 October, the day after the attack—it is so bleak and depressing that you can hardly see a way forward. But there is a solution and we know it can work. It comes down to working with our partners, and, most of all, working with the Government of Israel and with sensible people in the Occupied Territories, to make sure that we can have a solution which is free of Hamas and gives lasting security to the Palestinian people and Israeli citizens.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, do the Government assume that alternative sources of finance for humanitarian aid, which the Minister mentioned, will make up for the loss of financial aid currently going to UNRWA? Clearly, the Government are radically revising their policy at the moment and have set out these five important conditions. So far as the two-state solution is concerned, are the Government going to wait for the slowest? Will they wait for a consensus among their allies? What will they deem to be necessary before they accept a two-state solution? On the other matter, is the Minister confident that the Palestinian Authority is ready to assume responsibility for the West Bank and Gaza?

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

My noble friend the Foreign Secretary met the President of the Occupied West Bank Territories, Mahmoud Abbas, and will continue to talk to him to find, I hope, precisely that solution. On the noble Lord’s first point, on UNRWA, as I said, we have given to UNRWA what we were going to give this financial year, and the additional sums that we are promising will still get, in aid, to the people of Gaza through a variety of sources that I listed earlier.