Tom Levitt MP Talks About Gaza and West Bank Trip
2 May 2008
I am grateful to be called in a debate which, as my hon. Friend the Minister said, is timely not just for the reasons that he gave, but because it gives me the opportunity to report back briefly on the trip to the west bank, Gaza and Israel that four of us undertook two weeks ago. I was accompanied by my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton, South-East (Dr. Iddon) and for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) and the hon. Member for Brent, East (Sarah Teather).
What we saw in Gaza was exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Central (Mr. Sarwar) and the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) described, but it was worse than that. What we saw was a place being starved of aid and help. Ninety-three million dollars of UN money is sitting there in the bank to be spent on housing for homeless people and people in bombed-out houses. The money cannot be used because Israel will not let the cement or the concrete through the border. For the same reason the sewage works that the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton mentioned are not being repaired. It is not lack of money, but the fact that the cement and the concrete are not available.
Gaza is half the size of my High Peak constituency, but there are 1.5 million people living there, of whom 1 million are living in poverty, and it is getting worse. We met two boys in Shifa hospital, an 18-year-old who had had both his legs blown off by an Israeli missile three days earlier, and a 14-year-old with one arm and the whole of his abdomen removed by an Israeli weapon three days earlier who had been denied permission to move to a hospital in Israel in order to get treatment. I am certain, two weeks on, that that young man is dead, like many other victims of the conflict.
Our trip to Gaza was marked in its final seconds by being 50 yd away from a Kassam missile going off as we went through the Erez crossing. That gave us, for a brief moment, a feeling of how people on both sides of the border feel in the pervading air of uncertainty, never knowing when that weapon is going to come across. No notice is given?such things happen out of the blue. I was told that of all those sad and pathetic missiles that are launched by individuals out of Gaza at random at the people over the Israeli border, a third do not even reach Israel and fall on Gaza territory. Things cannot get more sad, pathetic and amateurish than that, against the might of the sophisticated military force deployed by the Israelis in that area.
We made a point of going to Sderot in Israel, where we saw the same thing. It is a city in which 7,000 of those weapons have fallen in recent years. They have killed 11 people. I know that the issue is not one of score cards and scoring off one side against the other, but the day after we were there the Israelis killed 18 in retaliation for the bombs that had been sent over the border. In Sderot, 500 people had been injured and countless houses and property had been damaged. The people there are angry because they do not think that they are getting the support that they want from the Israeli Government; last year, they were in Tel Aviv protesting about that.
I think that there is an insidious reason why those people have to stay and are being kept in Sderot. When the Israelis left Gaza, they destroyed factories and jobs and, in effect, exported the jobs to Israel. Unemployment in Israel is at 8 per cent.; unemployment in Sderot is at only 3 per cent. If someone wants to leave Sderot, how will they find a job elsewhere and sell their house? I think that it is in the Israelis? interest for the people of Sderot to be sitting ducks next to the border and targets for the sad and pathetic weapons that come over daily. In Israeli eyes, that justifies what my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Central correctly identified as collective punishment.
I want to finish by talking about Azzun, the village that we visited on the west bank. I had never heard of it before; it is a village of 10,000 people just outside Kalkiliya. From the border of Azzun, the Israeli wall, mentioned earlier, can be seen. At that point, the wall is 20 km from the internationally agreed green line. Azzun has lost a third of its agricultural land to new settlers, who have moved in not only from Gaza, having been relocated, but from America, Ukraine and all over the world, and for whom settlements have been built illegally by the Israelis in the occupied territories.
In the centre of Azzun is a fountain, only about 100 m from the main road that passes the village. In January, there were a series of incidents in which children were throwing stones at settlers? passing cars. That month, Israeli forces came in and set up roadblocks?mounds of earth?on every road around Azzun, put razor wire on top of the mounds and did not let anyone in or out of the village for weeks. Children coming from other villages for their education, and vehicles with food, were turned back. The major employers of the village lost three quarters of their employees within days, and were simply not able to trade.
I do not know whether those children had been put up to throwing stones; my guess is that children will be children, and children in occupied territories tend to express their parents? frustration. Whether prompted by the stones or anything else, the Israeli forces went in and on 30 separate occasions?both during and prior to that period?imposed a total 24-hour curfew, not letting people out of their houses. Israeli soldiers were smashing street lamps at night and playing loud music after midnight to keep people awake. That really is collective punishment. Thirty-five children from Azzun disappeared during the weeks of the siege. Many were taken without charge to a prison in the Negev desert?taken to another country to be put in prison illegally. Two weeks ago, 15 of them had not returned and they were not allowed visits from their families, or representatives of them, while they were away.
The week before we went to Azzun, most of the roadblocks came down; the day before we arrived, the last of the military patrols left. Although the main roadblock was still in place, pedestrians were at least using that route, and vehicles were using other routes, in and out of the village. It was collective punishment?people were being made to pay the price for having settlers on their doorsteps and daring to live on the route planned for the wall.
Today, the people of Israel are observing Holocaust remembrance day, and it is absolutely right that none of us should ever forget how Jewish people suffered during the holocaust. However, that suffering must never be an excuse for the collective punishment by means of the illegal wall, which takes 10 per cent. of the west bank into Israel. It is not an excuse for illegal settlements with their own road networks and whose economies are split on a principle of separate development?or apartheid, as it used to be called in South Africa. Nor is that suffering an excuse for the economic strangulation of the west bank and Palestine. It is not an excuse for the disrespect for human rights on detention or for collective punishment?which is illegal, whatever form it takes.
I commend my hon. Friend the Minister, his Department and the Department for International Development for their work in trying to get aid through?especially to that prison called Gaza. I am not a religious person, but I do pray that the talks will be successful in the end.