Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how much her Department has spent on humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip in each of the last five years.

Data for all DFID’s spend is available in the Statistics for International Development publication at

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-on-international-development. The figures for 2016 have just been released and those for 2017 will be released next year. Allocations for future years will be confirmed in due course. SID does not differentiate between DFID’s spend in the West Bank and Gaza.

The UK provided more than £17 million in immediate humanitarian assistance for those affected by the Gaza conflict in the summer of 2014. In October 2014, the UK pledged, and subsequently fully disbursed a further £20 million in early recovery assistance at the Gaza Reconstruction Conference in Cairo, including support for cash assistance to Palestinian refugees, mine removal and medical treatment. More recently the UK provided £1.9 million of humanitarian assistance to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Gaza to address critical water, sanitation and hygiene needs, benefitting approximately 1 million people. In addition the UK is a long-term supporter of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) which provides basic services to 1.3 million people in Gaza including basic health care, and we are supporting humanitarian access, enabling reconstruction efforts and investing in job creation in Gaza.