The lives of Palestinians and Israelis are at stake

Below is the text of Pippa's speech to Westminster Hall during the Palestinian Rights: Government Support debate on Tuesday 4th March 2025 . You can also read a transcript at Hansard, or watch the videos of Pippa speaking at the end of this article.

Thank you Chair. It is an honour to serve under you as Chair. I would like to thank the Honourable Member for Gainsborough for bringing this critically important debate.  

Together with other Members who are speaking today, I have just returned from a cross-party MP journey to Israel and the West Bank: a journey that brought us face to face with the human cost of war for both Israelis and Palestinians. We met so many people of all ages, from all sides and at all levels of power who are working daily to try and bring about the conditions for lasting peace in spite of the unspeakable and ongoing trauma of both – on the one hand - the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on October 7^th killing over 1200 people in southern Israel, taking hundreds of hostages and still holding 60 hostages captive and – on the other hand - the brutal war in Gaza for over a year, killing 45,00 Palestinians, including 18,000 children, displacing thousands and imprisoning many. 

A different kind of violence extends to the West Bank. It is not new, did not start on October 7^th and has been ongoing during the ceasefire agreement in Gaza. During our visit, we were witness to the impacts of daily violence by extremist settlers in the Occupied Territories, of the violence of unlawful occupation and settlements, themselves, and of the policies that continue to erode the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people. 

That includes the rights of the young Palestinian schoolgirl and her family whom we visited in her village of Susiya. She told us how on a nightly basis, she is woken up terrified by marauding settlers who have set up their outpost just nearby. Just a couple of nights before we arrived, late at night, she heard the sound of stones being hurled against the window of her home. That night the settlers also smashed the window of her father’s car and slashed the car tyre. She can name them, describe them and point to where they live. We visited the primary school nearby – built with UK and European aid funding – which had been completely demolished by the settlers: desks were mangled, the educational picture books were strewn in the rubble and through a remaining window we had a clear view of the settler outpost. From there, a quad bike came rushing towards us with two settler youths, grins on their faces, swagger in their step and a sub machine gun slung over their shoulder. For us it was just harassment. For Nasser’s daughter and the families in the village, as you can imagine, it is a terrifying ordeal. That is why many people, Israeli and international, offer to provide what is called “protective presence” for Palestinian schoolchildren in the rural areas in their villages in the West Bank, to try to ensure the basic right of safety as they walk to school, to provide protective presence to Palestinian farmers trying to harvest their crops – and, even, harvesting the crop for them because, since October 7^th, they are blocked from entering their own fields by the hundreds of roadblocks. However, even this protective presence is all too often not enough. 

That same night, after we left the village, between 3 and 5 am there was a settler incursion during which the neighbour’s car was torched with a petrol bomb. The police attended at the request of the village but the main outcome was that two of the Internationals, staying overnight as protective presence, were arrested and are now in Jerusalem with a 2 week ban from visiting the West Bank. None of the villagers were reported injured during the incident but the loss of the vehicle will have a major impact on the livelihood of the farmer affected and everyone was experiencing the consequences of losing another night's sleep. 

Impunity, it seems. A two-tier system. The removal of equal rights of Israelis and Palestinians in the face of the law and the protection of the police. In fact, since 2005, only 3% of investigations into ideologically motivated crime against Palestinians in the West Bank have led to a full or partial conviction. This low conviction rate has – for at least two decades – signalled that law enforcement agencies do not take settler violence seriously, enhancing the perpetrators’ sense of immunity and encouraging the recurrence of these acts.  

This can be seen in the huge increase in settler violence since the Hamas attacks on October 7th 2023. With attention focused on Gaza and the hostage crisis in Israel, it has given an opportunity for settlers to attack with increasing impunity. 

From October 7, 2023 to December 31, 2024, at least 1,860 incidents of settler violence in the occupied West Bank were recorded – an average of four a day according to data from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). 

• Between October 1 and November 15, 2024, Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din documented 113 separate incidents of violence, harassment, harvest thwarting or damage to olive trees and crops involving Israeli civilians and soldiers. These incidents took place throughout the West Bank, on lands belonging to 51 Palestinian villages, towns and communities. In 68 of these incidents, settlers and soldiers forcibly prevented Palestinians from harvesting their olive trees. In approximately 70% of these incidents, personnel armed and funded by the State of Israel (military, police, settlement CSCs) were present at the scene, but instead of protecting the Palestinian harvesters, as their duty demands, they worked together with the settlers to prevent the harvest.

However, this is not the violation of Palestinian rights through the actions of a few extremist settlers.

It is important to understand the context within which this settler violence is occurring. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion declaring Israel's occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as unlawful under international law. The court emphasized that Israel's prolonged occupation and settlement activities violate the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and contravene international legal principles.

The evidence we were witness to in our visit was that this is not just the violence of a few extremist settlers, but what seems to be a systematic and accelerated process of unlawful settlement across the West Bank. Not just settler violence but he violence of unlawful settlement itself.

Therefore, whilst existing UK sanctions against extremist settlers and a number of settler organisations have been seen positively and have had some impact, UK sanctions need to go further and deeper to effectively damage the settler enterprise that constitutes continuous infringement of Palestinian rights.

Meanwhile, the many civil society organisations based in Israel who are working on human rights and peace-building are facing an existential crisis with an amendment to a new Bill working through Parliament right now: an amendment that would levy massive 80% taxes on NGOs funded by foreign governments including the UK, US and Europe, and erode their right to file lawsuits in Israeli courts. The implication of this amendment, should it pass, is that the Israeli human rights community will effectively be shut down as it receives most of its funding from foreign state entities. It also means that human rights organisations will not be able to use the courts to hold the government to account. This is one of the last remaining checks and balances on the Israeli government and will significantly reduce protection for Palestinians. We must raise our voices as the international community to encourage the government to not proceed further with this damaging legislation. We were assured that this has been effective in the past.

In conclusion, Chair, I would like to thank the organisation Yachad for organising the visit we made to Israel and the West Bank. Yachad is a British-Jewish organisation dedicated to the pursuit of a political resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. 

We bore witness to the suffering of both sides, both Israeli and Palestinian. The suffering we witnessed compels us to act, speak out and to ensure that the rights of those who have long been marginalised are protected. The face and future of that young Palestinian girl at the mercy of the marauding extremist settlers haunts us. At the same time, I came away with some hope in my heart, having met and heard Roni Keidar ( a Jewish mother, grandmother and peace activist)  whom we met on Nativ Ha’asra – one of the small agricultural communities on the Gaza border brutally attacked by Hamas on October 7^th. On the day we met her, Roni had just received the English translation of her new biography: ‘On the Border of Hope’. I remember her words so vividly: “either the Israeli and Palestinian people find a way to live together, or they will die together”.

I would therefore like to ask the Minister to reassure the House that the UK government is taking all steps to provide support towards lasting peace  and acknowledge that Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories are a key condition for lasting peace. We need:

1. Negotiations around Phase 2 of the ceasefire agreement need to take place as quickly as possible and, meanwhile, with the unconditional release of all remaining hostages and the flow of humanitarian aid unhindered into Gaza.
2. UK recognition of the ICJ ruling declaring Israel's occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as unlawful under international law.
3. A clear and public renunciation of President Trump’s Riviera proposals as ethnic cleansing: the forcible transfer of the over 2 million people of Gaza would constitute a crime against humanity, a blatant rejection of the core tenets of international law that have operated since the end of World War II and the adoption of the UN Charter;
4. UK government recognition of the Palestinian State and commitment to a 2-state solution; everyone that we met working to build lasting peace was clear that hope only lies with a political horizon. It’s not a question of whether people believe anymore in a 2-state solution. It’s that there is no alternative to a 2-state solution that does not contemplate forcible transfer of millions of people and ethnic cleansing.
5. Extension of UK sanctions against extremist settlers to regional councils in the West Bank which are responsible for funding construction and supply of services to illegal and violent outposts