Sarah Champion MP
Chair of the House of Commons International Development CommitteeThe humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, exacerbated by recent conflicts and severe restrictions on aid, has led to unprecedented suffering and societal breakdown. The article calls for international political will to prevent such disasters in the future and urges the UK to leverage its diplomatic and legal strengths to address and mitigate potential atrocities globally.
As I boarded the plane to Egypt in late February with fellow MPs on the International Development Committee, I mistakenly thought I knew what was happening in Gaza.
What we found was something much more shocking. “If there is a place on Earth that smells like hell, it’s Gaza. It’s apocalyptic,” one leading aid worker for a major UN agency told us. He had left Gaza earlier that day and driven 12 hours to speak to us, in the hope that we would report back to the UK, that it would help to get the violence to stop, and that it would help to increase the amount of aid getting in. That hope is yet to be realised.
An Unprecedented Humanitarian Disaster
Over several days, countless other seasoned aid workers told us the same thing – Gaza is the worst humanitarian situation they have ever seen. These people have spent their lives responding to famines, conflicts, and disasters. If they had seen worse hunger, they had never seen a worse state of societal breakdown and insecurity around aid provision.
The entire population is literally locked into the territory and unable to leave. Following the horrific October 7th terrorist attack, Israel immediately cut off the electricity and water supplies to Gaza. What aid the international community is mustering, coordinated by the amazing Egyptian Red Crescent, is routinely delayed or prevented from entering. The World Food Programme says the speed at which this entirely man-made hunger and malnutrition crisis has ripped through Gaza is “terrifying”.
A Famine Taking Hold in Gaza
As I write, the UN agency that tracks famine says it is “imminent” in Northern Gaza. In evidence in Parliament on February 27th, the World Food Programme’s country director described the last aid convoy they had tried to get in, a week earlier. As their convoy of 10 trucks of food crossed into Gaza City, he described tens of thousands of people surging forward. Because they came too close to the Israeli checkpoint, a tank opened fire on them, killing some and hitting the WFP vehicle. Even then, people continued to run forward, to run in waves into machine-gun fire for a box of food.
There are other important things you might not know about Gaza. Before this crisis, it was a significant producer of its own food, including fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, chicken, and eggs. Of course, there were issues of poverty and food insecurity but now, farm animals, harvests, and agricultural land have been lost. Replacing this capacity, making the land safe to farm again, and rebuilding stock will take many years.
A Functioning Health System Destroyed
Prior to the conflict, Gaza had a strong health system – built and supported by international aid – with good health outcomes and it sat around the middle of the region’s 22 countries on the main health indicators. Before this catastrophe, most of the people of Gaza died of many of the same things we in the UK mostly die of – heart disease, cancer, strokes, diabetes, etc. Since the conflict began, all of these chronic conditions have been largely untreated.
Very few hospitals in Gaza remain functioning and, in recent days, there have been horrifying new reports of hospitals that had been “cleared” by the IDF in the earlier phases, being re-entered by Israeli forces – battlegrounds once again, with patients and medics trapped inside.
“If Israel is at war with Hamas, not civilians, why aren’t the casualties men of fighting age?” a medic at Al-Arish Hospital across the Rafah border in Egypt, where the fortunate few medically evacuated from Gaza are taken, asked me.
He had a point. At the time of writing, nearly 32,000 Gazans have been killed, and it is reported that the vast majority of them – almost 70 per cent – are women and children. 57 per cent of those who’ve been brought out of Gaza with war injuries are under 19 years old, according to the Egyptian Ministry of Health.
The UK’s Global Role in Preventing Atrocities
The IDC’s recent report on Gaza said the UK Government must press for evidence to be gathered now so that thorough investigations about compliance with international law on both sides can take place. That is essential work, Israel and Hamas must be held to account. But those investigations will, once again, be about the past. In 2022, as evidence of Russia’s likely mass atrocities in Ukraine began to emerge, we called on the UK to urgently adopt a national strategy to prevent these crimes.
The UK should be employing its diplomatic reputation and legal strength to much greater effect and to alert others of future atrocities. We must use our network of embassies and train and support our ambassadors to spot the danger signs – hate speech and laws that marginalise or segregate certain groups from society. The UK can and must focus the international community’s attention to de-escalate situations and deter disproportionate and dehumanising actions.
Long-term Refugees
Al-Jazeera says more than 70 per cent of Gaza’s population – some 1.7 million people – were refugees before this conflict, most of them living in or near the eight refugee camps established in the aftermath of 1948. 80 per cent of that population is now internally displaced within Gaza. Vast swathes of the territory have been razed to the ground – and below. Where will these people “return” to?
In a report last year, the IDC called for a new global strategy on how the world supports long-term refugee host countries moving from the initial humanitarian response to a longer-term development approach that also incorporates the needs of host communities.
Globally, 76 per cent of current refugees have been displaced for more than five years. Jordan and Lebanon, which have some of the highest levels of refugees per capita in the world, have been at the forefront of the Syria response and have hosted Palestinian refugees for decades. But Jordan is now the second most water-scarce country in the world. Housing units in the Za’atari refugee camp, home to 80,000 people, need replacing. Lebanon’s own economy has been in catastrophic decline since October 2019, with serious repercussions for healthcare and education. Some 90 per cent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in extreme poverty.
Host countries are often left to pick up a disproportionate share of the costs but are rarely in any economic position to do so. Without a long-term strategy around this, we are just compounding an already untenable position.
In Gaza, a functioning society has been destroyed and replaced with 2 million stories of suffering. With international political will, we can rebuild Gaza and make sure this catastrophe never happens again. Do we have the political will?
This is just one of the articles that features in the foreign policy and defence section of the recent edition of Chamber’s Journal. To gain access to all others, please subscribe here to receive the online version, or visit our shop to receive a print copy.
