Mr Hamish Falconer

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. There was a rather large number of questions, but I will try to address them as much as possible, take interventions and leave some time for my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward), whose work in this area is so deep and respected across the Chamber, as we have heard. I may not be able to make as much progress through my speech as I might under normal circumstances, but I hope colleagues will forgive me, as many of them will already have heard me speak about the middle east for about an hour in the main Chamber. My hon. Friend is a stalwart voice on these questions. She has worked on them tirelessly in Parliament and before. I knew her when she was the chief executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians, and many across this Chamber will appreciate not just her work, but the work of the organisation she used to lead. It goes without saying that the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains a scar on our collective conscience. Many Members have asked what the view of history or the view of our constituents will be when this conflict hopefully comes to a close, and that sense rests heavily on me personally and heavily on the Government. More than 64,000 lives have been lost since October 2023. More than 2,000 people have been killed and 16,000 have been injured while seeking aid since May. Those are extraordinary figures in a—I was about to say in a modern context, but in any context at all. Let me turn first to some of the questions about accountability. I have called on the Israeli Government to conduct independent investigations into a number of strikes on a number of occasions. I agree with the request made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy; we will call again for independent investigations, particularly into the recent so-called double-tap strike on the hospital. It is a source of enormous frustration and tension between the Israeli Government and the British Government that, even in cases that have involved British nationals being struck in drone-recorded videos, as in the case of the World Central Kitchen attack, while there have been preliminary investigations conducted within the IDF, we still await, 15 months on, the findings of the military advocate general. I have met those families repeatedly and they, like so many other families affected, await the level of investigation and accountability that would give them satisfaction and provide confidence that the Israeli Government are taking accountability seriously. One of the contributions suggested that the Government were looking away or turning away. This is the longest opportunity I will have to talk about humanitarian aid since the recess, and I want to reassure colleagues that during that period I met UNRWA, MAP, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent and, perhaps most searingly, British doctors recently returned from Gaza, on a number of occasions. I heard directly the tales not just of injuries, as so many hon. Members have recounted during the debate, but of the injuries to children, the similarities in those injuries over particular periods and the impact that had on the British doctors who had gone out, let alone those affected and their families.