Kim Leadbeater

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and will tell some of those stories now. I spent time with some of the kindest, most resilient people I have met. Even back then it was deemed too dangerous for us to go to Gaza, but in the west bank we spent time with many amazing people under the most difficult of circumstances. If things were bad then, and if the prospect of the desperately needed two-state solution seemed then like a distant hope, now—following the unforgivable, murderous attack by Hamas on 7 October and the ensuing catastrophic level of death and destruction that has rained down on Gaza—it feels further away than ever. While much of the media coverage and conversation has rightly focused on the tens of thousands of people who have been killed and injured, along with the desperate need to see the release of all remaining hostages to give those heartbroken families some sort of closure, we cannot and must not ignore the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians in the west bank and the increase in settler violence. I saw that for myself. The villagers I met in the hills surrounding Nablus told me they lived in constant fear because of the ever-present risk of violence from settlers, who appeared to act with impunity. On the outskirts of one hamlet, a 27-year-old father of three young children had been shot dead just a few days earlier, after a group of settlers had descended on the area. We stood on the exact spot where he was killed and heard that, while the police had attended the incident, there had been no attempt to identify or track down the killer. The devastated family took us into their home and gave us tea, desperate for the world to hear their story amid their shock and grief. I visited Masafer Yatta, which the Israeli Government is determined to clear to make way for a military zone, and met families living in constant fear that their homes will be subject to the demolition orders that can be imposed on any structure. We saw abandoned homes with smashed windows where families had fled in desperation to escape settler violence. I also saw hope for the future, however fragile. At the Shuafat refugee camp I met brilliant young schoolchildren who told me of their ambitions to be engineers, lawyers and teachers—even poets and boxing champions. One girl told me, “We want to live like other children all over the world. We fight the occupation by studying.” Those children were living in overcrowded conditions, with unreliable access to basic essentials such as electricity and clean water, but they still had dreams of better days to come. It seemed to me then that the situation could not get any worse. How wrong I was. Many of those I spoke with accused the Israeli Government of complicity in the violence perpetrated by settlers. They denied it—but three years later, the mask has not just slipped; it has been ripped off, and forced displacement of Palestinians is Government policy, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich calling for Palestinian towns to be wiped off the map. It was for comments such as those that the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway quite rightly imposed sanctions on Smotrich and his fellow Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir last month. I hope those young children still have hope in their hearts. There are times when we may feel that there is nothing we can do to restrain the Israeli Government’s expansion of illegal settlements and the violence that goes with it; but if we can keep a flicker of that hope alive, that is not nothing, and by reasserting our commitment to a viable Palestinian state, alongside a safe and secure Israel, we can do that.