UK Parliament polar opposite of US Congress, openly condemns Israel.

I found this to be really, well, kind of shocking. You would never hear this from US Representatives, even if thats how they truly felt.

And this condemnation was after Israel had killed 200 Palestinians. Whats the death toll now, 700, 800, 1000?

I would imagine that more recent hearings would have been even more critical of Israel.

One MP in particular, Gerald Kaufman, has been a very outspoken critic.

Gerald Kaufman MP says his grandmother didn't die in the holocaust to provide a cover for Israelis killing Palestinian grandmothers today.

a reply to: gladtobehere

Kudos to them. It's about time one of the world's governments grows a pair and takes a stand against Israel.

1,200 and rising.
200 of which are children.

Half of my family being Jewish, I find myself needing to explain to people very regularly that it is not "the jews", but the regime that is Zionist Israel who are responsible for this bloodshed.

People like Netenyaho are only puppets, while war? It never changes.
Hiding behind religions, when resources are all that is ever sought after.

a reply to: gladtobehere
Death toll is well over a thousand and counting. Thousands more have been maimed & well over hundred thousand have been displaced with literally no where to go.

Israel is shooting fish in a barrel and destroying Gaza.

Hamas is welcoming to reign of death from the Israelis so they & the Palestinian people can be martyred.

Hamas knows it can never fight Israel, let alone kill civilians, so I suspect their plan is to sacrifice the Palestinian people so that the world turns on Israel. The right wing Israeli govt is doing a fine job of being baited into a fight.

The cycle of death and will continues, there is no end to it.

Just a note on what's happening in the video, for the benefit of those not familiar with Parliament's procedures.
The Foreign Secretary has just made a statement to the House, and M.P.'s are (technically) exercising their right to ask questions. (You will notice that each of these speeches has been framed as a mammoth question)
Each time he would have risen to answer the question, but the answers have been edited out.

Now theres something never thought would see .. though it will end up ignored as usual and israel will continue the slaughter ..

It's nice to see that a decent amount of MP's are strong enough to speak their mind although it's a little disappointing that the House was only half full. I still find it shocking that the politicians at the very top seem to be so quick to jump on the Israel defensive, with the eventual exception of Ed Miliband who made the vague assertion that he wasn't in favour of their actions.

During a UN vote on whether humanitarian aid should be given to Palestine (the vote that USA was the only country to go against), the UK abstained along with most western countries. It makes me wonder what exactly these countries are so afraid of.

originally posted by: ThinkingCap
1,200 and rising.
200 of which are children.

Half of my family being Jewish, I find myself needing to explain to people very regularly that it is not "the jews", but the regime that is Zionist Israel who are responsible for this bloodshed.

People like Netenyaho are only puppets, while war? It never changes.
Hiding behind religions, when resources are all that is ever sought after.

Spot on.

a reply to: gladtobehere

And yet, look at the date. The day after these questions were put to the Foreign Secretary, who at the time was William Hauge, there was a cabinet reshuffle, and he was replaced by Phillip Hammond. Hauge is now First Secretary of State, and Leader of The House of Commons.

Although it is refreshing to hear British parliamentarians making a strong case for a sterner stance on Israel's treatment of a largely defenseless Palestinian population, I find the timing of the removal of Hauge from the role of Foreign Secretary, to be highly strange. And it also has to be said, that for all their prattle in the House of Commons, there has been absolutely no form of extensive, forceful, and effective response from the UK government, to a civilian death toll which CONTINUES to climb, to the destruction of infrastructure, to the continued and illegal settlement building in the region, on the part of Israel.

This situation is still unfolding, people are still dying, and no one seems capable of bringing any form of order to this chaotic situation. The longer it goes on, the more sorrowful it becomes, the more entrenched the positions become, which only serves to solidify the situation in its current state.

Personally speaking, I find the behaviour of Israel in this matter to be, and I put this as mildly as is possible, utterly ghastly. It is the height of bad form to strike at ones neighbours, when one knows that the strongest attack their neighbour might wield against them, has little to no hope of striking its target. That is precisely the situation as it stands. Iron Dome destroys or renders beyond use, the vast majority of the projectiles to stream across the border between the Gaza strip and Israel. When compared with that system, the cheap, weak, ineffectual rockets which are fired against it, are blades of grass, thrown at a slab of steel by the limpest wristed individual one could encounter. The effects are minimal.

In response, Israel launches air strikes and artillery bombardments featuring some of the most sophisticated munitions ever developed, which despite the money spent on them, seem incapable of taking out terrorists, without murdering a heap of civilians at the very same time, which is shown by the current figures where the death toll is concerned. The effects are devastating. More than a thousand dead Palestinians, more than two hundred of them being children, thousands more injured, neighbourhoods flattened, hospitals damaged, UN schools and compounds destroyed or hit by shelling and air strikes, and the list of the lost continues to grow.

Further to the deaths we can count legitimately at this point, those ruined buildings, those smashed streets and broken districts, will continue to give up more dead as the days and weeks wear on, until or unless there ceases to be enough surviving people around, to keep searching these buildings, these districts, for the empty husks of the people who used to live there.

I spit on both Hamas, and the Israeli government. But I expect much better of Israel, than to treat the residents of Gaza as nothing more than collateral in their war with Hamas. I am not ignorant of the huge wrongs done to the residents of Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror, and I curse those wrongs, and the people who enacted them also, but this is a terrible situation, and Israel are the party in this situation who possess the upper hand, and therefore it is their responsibility to allow peace, by retreating inside their borders, collapsing and removing their illegal settlements, and concentrate ALL their technical, and military prowess on improving the Iron Dome to the point where assaults from outside of it, are as irrelevant as rain.

It has to be said that Iron Dome has been successful at threat mitigation, and I say that with no small amount of understatement. Three Israeli civilians have died so far in this conflict. Three.

It is facts like this, which make plain the disproportional nature of the Israeli response to the "threat" of Hamas rockets. They have the tools and funds to make any attack from across the border, totally and utterly irrelevant, and yet use the rocket attacks as a pass, to pound the Gaza strip with assaults for which the residents have no response, and from which they have no place to hide.