Arms Export Licences: Israel Debate
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Tony Lloyd
Main Page: Tony Lloyd (Labour - Rochdale)Department Debates - View all Tony Lloyd's debates with the Department for Business and Trade
(4 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered arms export licences for sales to Israel.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I am pleased to have secured this timely debate and grateful to the House authorities for granting it. More than 18,000 Palestinians, including more than 7,000 children, have been killed. More than 80% of the population—1.8 million people—has been displaced. Almost 100 journalists have been killed—the highest number in any global conflict in more than 30 years. More than 100 UN aid workers have been killed— more than in any conflict in UN history. This weekend, the UN warned that half the population of Gaza is facing starvation. Behind those horrifying statistics are real people with names, hopes, dreams, families and friendships that are just as real as yours or mine, Sir Christopher.
I start this debate by talking about Nour, a 17-year-old student from a town just south of Gaza City who wanted to be a doctor when she left school. In a page recovered from her diary, Nour spoke of her hope to make her family proud. Nour was killed when an Israeli airstrike hit her home on 11 October. I will also talk about 26-year-old Safaa and her baby girl Elyana, who were killed in their sleep when an Israeli fighter jet bombed their house in the southern city of Rafah. Then, there is Reem, whose lifeless body was cradled by her grandfather after her family home in al-Nuseirat refugee camp was hit by a strike. Her grandfather Khaled stroked her hair and kissed her goodbye for the last time, pinning her earring to his jacket as a badge to remember her by. He said,
“She was the soul of my soul”.
The horror is so extreme that it would be impossible to talk about all the people who have been indiscriminately killed. Just listing the names of all those who have been killed, let alone telling their stories, would take nearly 20 hours. I say that because I want to remind colleagues and the whole House of the shared humanity of those being slaughtered in Gaza today. I say it because, whether we like it or not, this place is deeply complicit in the atrocities we see being inflicted on the Palestinian people. Not only do the British Government provide vital diplomatic support for Israel, most recently joining the US as the lone voices refusing to call for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council—a move the US shamefully vetoed—but we supply the Israeli military with hundreds of millions of pounds-worth of arms.
Actually, the true figure is shrouded in secrecy. Under open export licences, arms companies can export an unlimited quantity of specified equipment with no further monitoring and no tracking of their total value.
Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, and she is absolutely right to ask why the UK abstained in the vote at the United Nations. She makes the point that we can never find out what arms exports have left this country and gone to Israel. Is it not time we had transparency in the arms trade?