Palestine
Debate between Robert Halfon and Mark Pritchard(10 years ago)
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Robert Halfon
My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. The problem is that the increasingly frequent terror attacks are constantly glorified by Hamas. The hon. Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris) talked about being disproportionate, but if Israel did not have the iron dome system, thousands of Israelis would have been killed by the missiles fired by Hamas. If that had happened, would it have been seen as a proportionate response?
There is a lot of hard evidence showing that genuine humanitarian aid was misappropriated by Hamas diverting the resources from their original goal of saving the population and using them for the construction of the tunnels and the acquisition of arms. That cannot remain a peripheral concern to those who push for a peace treaty between the two countries. The problem of Israeli security is one that permeates every aspect of civilian life in Israel, so it remains necessarily omnipresent in any discussions between Israel and Palestine. That affects the problem of the reconstruction of Gaza, where the Israeli Government proved their good will by striking a deal with the Palestinian Authority in September, agreeing to a bigger influx of resources to Gaza under the supervision of UN officials. By contrast, Hamas has just glorified every single terrorist attack that hit Israel, including the death of a three-month-old baby girl—
