Gaza

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, on securing this debate, and I congratulate her and the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, on their excellent speeches. It is timely to discuss Gaza’s misery as events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and now Tunisia push Palestinian issues in general and Gaza’s problems in particular further and further into the public and political background.

I have been to Gaza and met Hamas representatives both there and outside Gaza. There are undoubtedly some pretty unpleasant people among them, but I can think of many political parties around the world that have unpleasant people in them. That is not an excuse for not talking to them. It is easy to forget that Hamas won a democratic election, supervised by the UN, in 2006, so we have been involved in not having discussions with that particular democratically elected Government.

We found at the end of the day in Northern Ireland that we had to talk to the IRA. We found that the IRA itself had splintered and that some of the most unpleasant people had gone off to do other things that were even more unpleasant than anything the IRA did in its heyday. That is no excuse in the modern world for refusing to discuss with Hamas and trying to forge some capacity to help Israel engage with Hamas. Standing on the sidelines hoping for better weather to arise in Gaza, which is what we do, does not seem to me to be a very credible strategy for a modern Government in Europe.

I want to spend the rest of my time picking up some of the issues about what we are allowing to happen in Gaza to its children. Their plight is terrible—the BBC will be reminding us bravely this week of some of the trauma that they have suffered. The US seems to have retired hurt from the Middle East and Europe now has to start to make up its own mind what it wants to do in this area.

The context is pretty terrible as far as Gaza’s children are concerned. The starting point in their plight is the civilian death and destruction caused by the Israeli military in July and August last year. This was not just the first conflict, it was the third such conflict in six years, with further destruction piled on that from the previous two. Let me quote from the March 2015 draft of a UN damage and needs assessment:

“During the 51 day escalation, bombardments, air strikes and ground incursions resulted in an estimated 2,260 direct casualties”—

that is a euphemism for killings—

“including 612 children … and 230 women ... 10,625 people were injured, among them 3,827 children … and 1,773 women ... 899 people were left permanently disabled”.

None of these dire statistics tells us anything about the casualties left over from the previous two conflicts or about those children and their mothers who survived all three but have been left severely traumatised by their experience. Studies show that mental disorders are consistently higher in Gaza than in Israel. These casualties would be a challenge for any healthcare system, let alone one so impoverished as Gaza’s. The last conflict alone killed and injured over a 100 healthcare workers, with ambulance drivers disproportionately affected. A WHO assessment of 87 health facilities has revealed that 25 have been severely damaged or destroyed, and goes on to say:

“El-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital ... was specifically targeted and totally destroyed following warnings from the GoI to evacuate its patients and staff”.

WHO estimates the economic losses to the health sector at over $380 million. There is a chronic shortage of pharmaceuticals, supplies and spare parts for medical equipment. All this is on top of the damage to water and sewage facilities, housing, electricity and the food supply. Between 95% and 97% of the water supply is unfit for human consumption.

This is the context in which Gaza’s children are growing up: high unemployment, no prospect of jobs, traumatised, poor, with 80% of the population dependent on donor aid. Would we really be surprised if some of them turn to ISIL and Islamic Jihad, and would we really be surprised if those numbers increased? We are bringing on ourselves and helping Israel to bring on itself a move to extremism. This will do even more damage in Gaza and do damage to Israel itself.