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Gaza

My hon. Friend anticipates what I was about to say and the questions that I was going to pose for the Minister at the end of my remarks. The political context is inseparable from the humanitarian context in that sense. We were privileged when we reached the west bank to meet the Prime Minister, Salam Fayyed, and the chief of staff to President Abbas, Rafiq Husseini. The clear message from the Palestinian Authority is that it is difficult to negotiate with the Israelis at all at the moment, because of the Israeli attitude and the Authority's weakness and disorganisation. The Palestinians are concentrating on Palestinian unity, which is long overdue, and external aid, both material and in terms of pressure on the Israeli Government, to achieve what my hon. Friend suggested. I shall give two examples of the problems with aid, although I do not imaging that my hon. Friend the Minister underestimates them. We visited is al-Wafa hospital. It is not an emergency hospital, but a hospital for elderly people and for rehabilitating people with long-term problems arising from strokes, comas and so on. It is an extremely impressive institution. Two new blocks costing $5 million had just been built—one by the Welfare Association and one by the Kuwaiti Government—and were due to open on 1 January. However, they were shelled almost into destruction. Certainly, they will need $2 million or $3 million to renew the buildings. Part of the hospital was funded by the Department for International Development. The gardens around the hospital, which were well laid out as part of the rehabilitation features, were paid for by DFID—there is a plaque proudly displayed on the wall to that effect. We were in the surreal position of being shown around the gardens by local people, who pointed out where white phosphorous had landed and burnt into the ground. They showed us lumps of it. Four weeks after they landed on the hospital, those lumps were still smoking, and they would still burst into flames when poked or prodded. The Government ought to take up with the Israeli authorities the arrogance and disregard shown in that action. We also visited the United Nations Relief and Works Agency warehouses in the centre of Gaza city. As was well documented, the warehouses were bombed by the Israelis, who must have known from their global positioning system co-ordinates exactly where they were. Phosphorous bombs and heavy ordnance—fortunately, in one case, the ordnance did not explode—were landing next to fuel tankers that were there to supply fuel to the people of Gaza. The fact that the Israeli defence force and the Israeli Government are prepared to do that says more about the scale of the task we face in dealing with them than I can. As my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea said, the problem of access is not new—it does not date from 27 December, but at least from the election of the Hamas Government. The response to years of telling the Palestinians that they had to adopt democratic standards seems to be to bomb their Parliament building. There have been two years of an almost complete blockade in which, ironically, the only way that Gaza continued to function, if it did at all, was through the tunnels under the Egyptian border. The tunnels are now not only being bombed, but policed by the Royal Navy to ensure that materials do not get through. Of course, the policing is designed to stop arms supplies, and that is a necessary pre-requisite to peace, but disarming both sides, too, is a pre-requisite to peace. However, that puts the cart before the horse, which is an apposite analogy, given that a lot of the transport in Gaza is horse and cart because of the lack of fuel—