Gaza: Humanitarian Situation

Paul Masterton Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Paul Masterton (East Renfrewshire) (Con)]

Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007, the humanitarian situation has deteriorated drastically. Hamas does not use international aid for the benefit of its citizens, to build schools or hospitals. Instead it uses it to build sophisticated tunnels into Israel, with the intention of committing terror attacks.

It has gone relatively unreported, and has certainly not been mentioned in this debate, that Israel has facilitated the passage of well over 10 million tonnes of construction materials into Gaza since Operation Protective Edge in 2014. It has expanded and developed its Kerem Shalom goods crossing to increase its capacity to 800 trucks a day, which carry food, medical equipment, fuel, building materials and more. Yet on at least three occasions in recent weeks Hamas has set fire to the crossing and to the gas pipelines that serve the people of Gaza. It has refused and destroyed aid supplies, including the medicines whose severe shortage other Members have highlighted, when it has been realised that they came from Israel. That attitude is completely incomprehensible and only compounds the suffering of Gazans, who are living in the most horrifying situation.

Israel regularly allows Gazan patients to get treatment in Israel, and helps Gazan doctors and nurses to receive further medical training at Israeli hospitals. When I visited Tel Aviv I saw Israeli doctors at Save a Child’s Heart providing life-saving heart surgery to Palestinian children and training Palestinian doctors, who will return to Gaza where they will be able to perform the surgery themselves.

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend makes the point that Israeli hospitals treat citizens from Gaza. Is he aware that some of the people who have been treated have included senior Hamas operatives and members of their families, and their children?

[Paul Masterton]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point, which is a good one. Senior officials in Hamas are always too ready to allow access to those high standards of healthcare in Israel, although they seek to block it for their own citizens.

The moments in that Tel Aviv hospital gave me hope that peace could be achieved, because Palestinians and Israelis worked together there as equals with mutual respect. When we debate the disastrous humanitarian situation in Gaza we cannot ignore the role of Hamas, as others have sought to do. What struck me when I was in the west bank and met the Palestinian chief negotiator was the fact that his overriding emotion was not frustration, anger or upset; instead there was a sense of despondency and guilt, because he keenly felt that the loss of the Gaza elections to Hamas in 2006, the battle of Gaza in 2007 and the political violence of 2009, when opponents of Hamas were tortured, shot and thrown off buildings, have created an insurmountable obstacle to peace and left the innocent people of Gaza at the mercy of an authoritarian militant jihadi regime.

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Paul Masterton]

No, I am sorry but I do not have time.

It is important to note that the Palestinian Authority are not reconciled with Hamas. They cannot work with it or bring it to the table. They do not want Hamas to be in control of Gaza. They have sought to use financial measures to isolate it, and in the past couple of weeks President Abbas has really tried to increase pressure on the regime to transfer power over to Ramallah. Until Hamas renounces violence, seeks to work for peace and co-operates with the international community, the humanitarian situation in Gaza will only get worse.