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International Affairs

I, too, will not be balanced because of the limited time available. I absolutely accept that the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister are acting in good faith. I am sorry that the Foreign Secretary cannot be here to hear that. However, I profoundly disagree with their judgment on this issue. I do not feel that the Prime Minister’s responses to questions yesterday and following the G8 summit demonstrated an even-handed approach, and many of my constituents have contacted me to say the same. That particularly applies to the issue of proportionality by the Israelis. It is meaningless for the Government to keep saying that they call on the Israelis to exercise restraint and ask them to be proportionate and to act within international law, but then fail pointedly to answer the question of whether they think that the current action is proportionate or within international law. The blitzkrieg—there is no other way of describing it—that has been unleashed on Lebanon beggars belief. Merely talking about numbers of missiles on either side does not get across the inequity of the situation. Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world. Its missiles and weapons are of a different order of magnitude to the weapons ranged against it. That is not to excuse the people attacking the Israelis; I decry those attacks too. However, it is out of all proportion to launch that indiscriminate blitzkrieg on Lebanon against civilian targets, which has already resulted in 359 deaths, including 294 civilians, of whom a third were children. Some 1,000 people have been wounded and 500,000 displaced. Now that the foreign civilians have been evacuated, there is a fear that the bombing will increase still further. The Israeli defence force said today that it believes that it has got rid of half of Hezbollah’s military capability. Does that mean that there are to be another 359 deaths and another 500,000 displaced before it has achieved its aims and stops what it is doing? If the Government are to have credibility, they must be seen to be even-handed and to uphold international law and say that the Israeli action is disproportionate. Many people in Israel are prepared to say that their Government are acting disproportionately, so why will not this Government do so? I should like to draw attention to the action in Palestine, where Gaza is under siege. The whole civilian population—