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Natasha Hausdorff responds to the content of the House of Commons Gaza Debate.
2024-02-24 (302)
Natasha Hausdorff answers questions from the Sun about the 21 February 2024 House of Commons Gaza Debate, before the controversy and intrigue erupted over the decision of the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, to allow a vote on the Labour motion over that of the SNP.
Gaza ceasefire will ‘enable’ Hamas and ‘West is next,’ human rights lawyer warns!
Video Transcription:
The calls that we've been seeing over the
course of today for a ceasefire unfortunately seem
to fall unilaterally on Israel and deprive Hamas
of agency and of responsibility.
What we're seeing in terms of the debate in
parliament also is requiring Israel essentially to cease its
self defense and its efforts to return the hostages.
134 hostages remain in Hamas captivity, with reports
of torture, rape and other forms of violence
being metered out against them, as well as
starvation and the deprivation of medical attention.
And Israel has been clear in its aims from the
start of this war that it intends to destroy Hamas
and its capability to ever conduct anything like the 7
October again and to return the hostages.
What's interesting is that for the most
part, the international community was signed on
to those aims until now.
And this about face is inexplicable because the
ability to complete those aims, return the hostages
and destroy Hamas, would never have been possible
without the final Hamas stronghold in Rafa being
subject to this military operation.
And so this is a big change in policy, and
the reasons for it have certainly not been coherent.
How fair is it to say that there is a
double standard when it comes to Israel, whenever it's military
response to a terror attack like the massacres of October
7, that isn't applied to any other army?
What we've seen is unfortunately far worse than a double
standard we have seen in the course of this debate.
Blood libels and complete falsehoods being
leveled against Israel and in particular
its military operation in Gaza.
Untruths being told not only about the way
that Israel is prosecuting this operation against Hamas,
but also about the application of international law
and international humanitarian law, specifically allegations
of war crimes which have absolutely no basis in the
reality and the facts or the law.
The fact of the matter is that those military
and legal experts with an insight into Israel's past
military operations in Gaza, as well as an understanding
of Israel's operations, now have been consistently clear that,
in fact, Israel goes well above the requirements of
international law in the precautions that it takes against
civilian collateral damage and in targeting its strikes and
providing warnings of those strikes, so much so that
it's been called the most moral army in the
history of warfare.
Now, that is completely at ods, with what
we have heard, with unfounded and untrue allegations
of Israel targeting palestinian civilians, and repeated
references to casualty figures that are put out by
the Hamas terrorist group through its control of
the health authorities in Gaza.
Now, the casualty figures that have been relied
upon in the course of this debate are
missing some important pieces of information.
The first is any form of independent
investigation, because the Hamas figures themselves cannot
be taken as a given.
We have multiple examples of
clear inflation and fabrication.
The second aspect of the problems with
these figures is that they make no
distinction between civilians and combatants.
And indeed, we've seen many parliamentarians referring to
them in the course of this debate as
though they were all civilian casualties.
Now, Israel has been clear that the number of
terrorists it knows to have eliminated is approaching 12,000.
What we simply don't know is how many
in total are members of Hamas or palestinian
islamic jihad, or even perhaps ordinary civilians taking
part in hostilities, in taking up arms, and
therefore becoming legitimate military targets themselves.
That we certainly don't know.
The other aspect of this information, which is not
something that Hamas is putting out, is how these
people it claims have died, became deceased.
Because we do know that Hamas are targeting their
own civilians in Gaza, that they have been shooting
them, that they have been bombing fleeing civilians, convoys
following the path of the humanitarian corridors that Israel
has sought to protect and defend.
That is Hamas direct fire.
Only in the last couple of days, the protests
that we have seen erupting against Hamas in the
Gaza Strip by ordinary palestinian civilians, those have also
been targeted by direct live fire.
And the other manner in which Hamas has
been killing its own civilians is with rockets
fired by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that
frequently fall short in the Gaza Strip.
And we've seen examples of this famously in the context of
the al Akli hospital car park on the 17 October.
But there are very many rockets that are targeting
israeli civilians that, in fact, fall short in the
Gaza Strip that have also been killing civilians.
All of this, of course, all of this important
context and the responsibility of Hamas was wholly absent
from the debate for the most part.
And the vast majority of parliamentarians had
simply attributed all of the deaths to
Israel's actions of self defense.
And that is not correct on the basis of
what we know about the facts on the ground.
It stems from repeated blood libels, allegations of
ethnic cleansing, now even of genocide, which are
an inversion of reality when we consider that
the real genocide was perpetrated by Hamas, acts
of genocide against Jews on the 7 October.
And that when we also consider, of course, that
Hamas has threatened to do this again and again,
and we've seen an inversion of reality and continual
unfounded blame being put on Israel, that has been
the cornerstone of so very many of the speeches
calling for the ceasefire in this debate.
An immediate ceasefire would, of course, leave
the 134 hostages in Hamas captivity.
And it's clear from the hostages that Israel was
able to release through its negotiations, that it was
only military pressure on Hamas that facilitated that humanitarian
pause, which was then very quickly violated by Hamas
when it suddenly refused to return the remaining female
hostages and then began to fire upon Israel.
So when we think about how the previous exchange
was facilitated, how the previous extraction return of hostages
was facilitated, and we think about the prospects of
the future release of hostages, what this debate and
what calls for this ceasefire are doing are encouraging
Hamas to keep going and encouraging Hamas to continue
its attack on Israel, and to refrain from realistic
negotiations and the return of the hostages. They also.
These calls for a ceasefire do an enormous wrong
to the palestinian people, because they suggest, these parliamentarians
that have been issuing this call, that Hamas should
remain, and Hamas should remain in a position not
only where it continues to threaten Israel and repeats
its desire to commit the atrocities of the 7
October over and over again, but where it continues
to oppress, torture and abuse and neglect its own
civilians in the Gaza Strip.
And the Palestinians in Gaza deserve better than that.
They deserve the support of the international community
to rid them and Israel of Hamas once and for all.
We've seen the result of previous ceasefires,
essentially imposed by pressure from the international
community all the way from 2008 through,
of course, in 2014, in 2021.
On each of these occasions, Hamas has used the
opportunity to expand its terror network and infrastructure
and rearm in order to continue to pose what it
hopes is an existential threat to Israel.
It has been clear about its intentions here.
And what the international community and members of parliament
in the United Kingdom really need to understand is
that by continuing to support Hamas in its efforts
to avoid its destruction, they are simply taking us
back to a situation where this cycle will continue
over and over again.
The only hope for the peace that they profess
is to ensure that Hamas is eradicated, to ensure
that it can no longer govern the Gaza Strip.
And in keeping with that, we've heard references
to a Marshall plan for Gaza in the
course of the debate in parliament.
It's important to note, of course, that
the Marshall plan was set in motion
in parallel with a program of denazification.
And when we consider the real cause of not
just the atrocities of the 7 October, but all
of the terrorism that israeli civilians have suffered under
for decades, this has been the result of programs
of indoctrination which have been funded by international
taxpayers and supported by United nations organizations.
3000 terrorists crossed the border on the 7 October,
and according to UN statistics, about three quarters of
them would have been educated in UN run schools
under the UNRA system and the Palestinian Authority curriculum.
And it is through this indoctrination from kindergarten
onwards, that we have seen an unrelenting support
for the programme that Hamas has put forward
for slaughter of Jews and for the attempted
annihilation and continued acts of genocide against jews.
The fact that this has been absent from the
discussion, and that instead this tick box scenario of
calling for a ceasefire that would leave this indoctrination
and this terror and this oppression of the palestinian
people themselves in place, is extremely revealing.
It shows that what we have seen on display
is a great deal of ignorance and arrogance.
And I've also seen certain discussions talking about it
in the context of a colonialist imperialist attitude.
The notion that the palace of Westminster would be able
to educate those in the region as to what the
real issues are and the proper and appropriate paths to
peace, that certainly isn't going down very well amongst those
that truly understand what Hamas is about and what Iran's
terror proxies are seeking to achieve.
When I say that they are playing into the
hands of the terrorist organization Hamas, the international clamor
that is now seeking to prevent Israel from pursuing
its lawful rights of self defense and conducting this
military operation in accordance with international law, calls that
are seeking to put pressure on Israel to desist
serving the interests of Hamas because they are enabling
the Hamas leadership to seek to survive to fight
another day.
And that is surely the major fashion in which
the conflict, and in particular the suffering of the
people in the Gaza Strip, will be perpetuated.
And what's your message to UK politicians?
Ultimately, it has to be this, that
this is not simply Israel's fight alone.
Hamas, Hizbalah, as proxies of ISIS, see Israel as the
first enemy on a very long battle against the west.
The West is next is a phrase that
has certainly garnered currency in recent weeks.
It may sound trite, but it is extremely
important to understand that the approach and the
aims of these islamist fundamentalist terrorists are contrary
to all values of freedom and democracy and
western liberal democratic values.
And that has been the key element of
the oppression also of the palestinian people and
the inability of proper, representative liberal government to
flourish in the territories that are controlled both
by Hamas but also by the Palestinian Authority.
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