Israel and Palestine

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) on so eloquently introducing this debate, and I, too, congratulate the petitioners on organising a petition with so much support across the country, including across my constituency. Thousands of my constituents have signed these petitions, and thousands more have written to me to express their feelings about the appalling violence they see unfolding in Gaza.

In almost every one of the getting on for 6,000 emails I have received, there has been unequivocal condemnation of the violence, attacks and brutality perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas on 7 October: the indiscriminate slaughter of 1,200 people in Israel—it was indeed a pogrom—the rockets indiscriminately fired by Hamas; the indiscriminate hostage taking. My constituents, like the constituents of so many hon. Members here today, have watched in horror at the destruction that has now cost the lives of 18,000 people in Gaza, that has now injured 50,000 people in Gaza and that has now rendered Gaza the most dangerous place on earth to be a civilian. Some 2.2 million people are now in desperate need of food assistance.

UNRWA—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which we helped to create all those years ago to bring respite to the people of Gaza and the west bank—now calls Gaza “hell on earth”. The World Food Programme is now very clear:

“With just a fraction of the needed food supplies coming in, a fatal absence of fuel, interruptions to communications systems and no security for our staff…we cannot do our job.”

The World Food Programme—a food programme created by the world to feed those in need—is now saying clearly to us that it can no longer do its job.

Oxfam is also now clear that the safe zones are, in its words,

“a mirage: unprotected, not agreed…beyond Gaza itself”.

It fears that people will be forced out of Gaza for the last time, and that the aid agencies will be forced into the devil’s own choice of providing aid while collaborating with that evacuation of people from Gaza.

When we have violence that extreme, surely what we should be doing across this House is arguing for a binding-on-all-sides ceasefire, arguing for peace, and arguing for negotiations. Instead, our Government went to the United Nations, days before we celebrated the anniversary of the UN declaration of human rights, and abstained on a question of moral force and justice. That motion itself was triggered by the United Nations Secretary-General—not a nobody—using emergency provisions, because he warned that the humanitarian aid system was at “risk of collapse”. That is how bad it had become.

In a situation like that, it was the wrong call to abstain on that UN Security Council vote. We should have voted for a ceasefire. We should have voted with almost every other member of the Security Council and sent a message of peace, of negotiations and of a binding-on-all-sides ceasefire, not least because such a vote would not have been without precedent.

I was a member of the Cabinet in 2009 when we voted for Security Council resolution 1860. Despite United States opposition, that called for a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. We must be honest; it was not immediately successful, but it changed the terms of the debate on the ground. It laid the groundwork for the peace that eventually came. That is what it means to use our weight in the international institutions of which the UK is a member to make the case for peace—to make the case for a permanent ceasefire.

I therefore hope that the Minister will be able to explain, when he rises to his feet: if not now, then when? How many more people will die before the United Kingdom does the right thing and votes for peace, votes for negotiations and, yes, votes for a ceasefire?