From the automatic rifles slung over their shoulders to their swaggering gait, it was rapidly clear that the two twentysomethings who accosted us were Israeli settlers.

I and five other British MPs were visiting the ruined Palestinian village of Zanuta, seeing up close for ourselves the bulldozed homes of farmers and the wrecked primary school of children long gone.

Just as we were taking in the sheer devastation of the site, documenting the shattered walls covered in pupils’ coloured handprints and upended desks, the two settlers sauntered up and proceeded to try to intimidate us.

Their attempts to photobomb our collective photograph, their questions as to who we were and why we were there, could have been shrugged off as juvenile boarishness. But the menace and the arms they carried were unignorable.

After they disappeared in their pickup down a dusty track, we knew we’d had just a tiny, bitter taste of the harassment, humiliation and impotence endured by Palestinians every day in the West Bank.

So-called “hilltop youth”, part of Jewish families driven by religious fervour that this “their” people’s ancient land, live on outposts dotted across Palestinian territory. And they behave with impunity.

Zanuta was for many years a village of Palestinian farmers, inured to the constant pressure of being in occupied territory dominated by an Israeli Defence Force and police that did little to protect them or grant them any rights.

But after Hamas unleashed its horrors of October 7, murdering 1,139 people and taking 250 hostages in its raid from Gaza to southern Israel, the residents of Zanuta felt a swift and collective punishment for sickening crimes they’d never committed, nor endorsed.

As extremist Israeli settlers went on a rampage of revenge from their outposts, farmers and other families were forced to flee their village. Every building was either bulldozed or ransacked, most at night.

We saw their smashed wells, their slashed water pipes, their dismantled electricity lines, their olive trees uprooted, all intended to prevent any return. Some brave souls had tried to return to pitch tents and fought legal battles for their land, but faced an Israeli occupation that has for years rigged the system against them, refusing building permits while settlers are allowed to build without any similar restrictions.

In the aftermath of October 7, Palestinians across the West Bank have been under siege. Unemployment has doubled and there are more than 900 roadblocks and other restrictions on movement. More than half a million children in the West Bank have not been able to go to school for more than a year.

And since the ceasefire deal began in January, things have deteriorated yet further.

While Gaza has been given some respite from its own appalling death toll, life in the West Bank has got markedly worse.

Just as the airstrikes and guns fell silent in Gaza, they started up in Jenin and other areas as Israeli military began the forced displacement of more than 40,000 civilians from refugee camps they’d called home for decades.

The “Gazafication” of the West Bank is not even denied by some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ministers, it’s boasted about.

For many Israelis, the uncompromising military approach is seen as necessary to prevent them ever again being subjected to a pogrom like October 7.

During our trip, Hamas’ disgusting treatment of the bodies of Israeli hostages, on a day of national mourning for mother Shiri Bibas and her sons, nine-month old Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, hardened that resolve even more.

Yet away from the headlines and the hate, there is another story. And there are other voices than the extremists who dominate the discourse.

On this trip organised by Yachad, the impressive British Jewish group which campaigns for a political solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, we got to hear those voices in person.

The common message of everyone we encountered was this: please tell the world what’s really happening here. There is trauma on both sides, and much fear for the future. Yet amid the darkness, we met Palestinians and Israelis, young and old, who told us they had hopes for a more peaceful coexistence.

For many Palestinians, their story and their pain predates October 7. Nasser Nawaj’ah was born in a cave in Khirbet Susiya, in the hills near Hebron. His father was displaced from his own home in what is now southern Israel, in 1948.

Like many Palestinians in the rural West Bank, Nasser and his fellow villagers lived in caves, a centuries-old tradition to keep warm in winter and cool in summer. But in recent years, their caves have been filled in by Israeli military bulldozers and their water cut off, all as settlers erect their own homes nearby.

Nasser’s concrete bungalow has a sign on the side that says it was built with funds from the British Consulate-General in Jerusalem and other European countries. “Humanitarian Support to Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer in the West Bank,” the sign declares, in what reads like a warning to settlers and Israeli troops that may or may not go heeded.

But the intimidation and harassment from settlers is a daily reality. Nasser’s young daughter tells us how she was walking home from school when settlers threw stones at her. Nasser’s windows are covered with metal bars to protect them from rocks. He shows me his car’s windscreen smashed by rocks, and its tyres slashed slashed. The night after we left him, his neighbour’s car was set on fire.

We rightly condemn Hamas as terrorists. Yet the extremist Israeli settlers are rarely given the same designation, despite the head of the country’s internal security service, Shin Bet, warning last year that “the escalating phenomenon of Jewish terrorism from the ‘hilltop youth’” – with their murders, arson and intimidation – undermined Israel’s reputation across the world.

This is a place on the map designated ‘Area C’ under the Oslo peace plan, outside control of the Palestinian Authority and left to the mercy of Israeli military occupation.

There is no equality under the law, with local people left in a Kafkaesque nightmare of seeing homes bulldozed by settlers, then when they rebuild them they’re told they lack planning permission so see them bulldozed by the military.

Local homes are being destroyed at a rate of 1,000 buildings a year, with villagers steadily forced into Areas ‘B’ and ‘C’, urban centres with nominal control by the Palestinian Authority.

Instead of being able to rely on soldiers or police to protect them, Palestinians see the security forces not just standing by but actively helping the settlers.

We were told how settler ‘security coordinators’ or militia are deeply embedded with the IDF, sharing military video camera footage and even sharing radios. Some 90 illegal outposts have been legalised in the past year.

There were 3,000 homes demolished in 2024, 2,200 schools attacked, and settlers increasingly dominate the military reserve, becoming ‘soldier-settlers’. Settlers have erected roadside billboards written in Arabic, declaring “There’s no future in Palestine”, a message designed to provoke or depress those who read it.

The statistics are grim. Some 93% of settler crimes unpunished and 33% of  Palestinians no longer report the crimes because nothing is done – and because even filing report to a district office risks retaliation as settlers are now embedded in the police, councils and the courts. Just 3% of the crimes have resulted in convictions but of those the punishment is a judicial slap on wrist. Six extremist settlers have been released against the advice of the security services.

Worst of all, according to some Israelis we met, the settler-protecting activities of the Israeli troops in the West Bank shifted resources to the wrong area, leaving the country’s border with Gaza minimally protected when Hamas struck so wickedly on October 7, 2023.

Increasing numbers of former Israeli soldiers are speaking out about the abuses carried out in their name. Joel Carmel, who attended London’s Jewish Free School as a boy but migrated to Israel and did his military service, is now part of a veterans group called Breaking the Silence.

On a tour of Hebron, Joel explained to us the army’s modus operandi. Groups of soldiers regularly go on nightly ‘mapping missions’, a euphemism for an excuse to dominate West Bank populations.

Joel described his first such mission in the dead of the night, his heavily armed colleagues banging on the door of a Palestinian house to get the terrified family to appear in their nightwear and answer questions about their names and ID numbers.

To try and reassure the children – aged six to ten – that they were not going to be harmed, Joel smiled at them. “They didn’t smile back,” he said. “Of course they didn’t smile back.” The whole point of the exercise was not military defence or intelligence gathering. It was simply “to make our presence felt”, he was told by his commander.

The centre of Hebron, which is the second largest city in the West Bank with a population of 220,000 Palestinians, is rightly known now as a “ghost town”. An Israeli settlement created in the heart of the city is inhabited by around 800 settlers, who are guarded by more than 600 Israeli troops.

To protect the settlers, the streets have been cleared of Palestinian presence. Where there was once a thriving spice market, meat market and vegetable market, the shuttered shops are silent. On the main street, we saw Palestinian homes had had their front doors welded shut by the IDF to prevent them entering a restricted area.

Yehuda Shaul, founder an former director of Breaking the Silence, told us how he had been stationed as a soldier in Hebron. Palestinians simply lacked the same rights as Israeli settlers, seeing their shops closed down and their movements tightly restricted. Yehuda says it’s just one example of the wider problem. “Hebron is not any anomaly – it’s a microcosm,” he said.

The full horror of October 7 itself was laid bare when we visited Roni Keidar in her home of Netiv Ha’Asara, in southern Israel close to the Gaza border. Three Hamas fighters descended on the village via paragliders and went on a depraved killing spree that murdered 20 people.

Roni told us how she and her husband had locked themselves in, and messaged their daughter and son-in-law’s family nearby, who were hiding in a wardrobe terrified as they heard the shooting outside. Her daughter’s neighbours were Bilha and Yaakovi Inon, who were murdered as their house was burned to the ground.

The Inons’ burned-out former home is a monument to the hell of October 7. A mural honours the couple, but there is also a backpack poignantly hung up on a wall. It was a bag that Bilha would take to the mass protests against Netanyahu’s attempts to wreck Israel’s independent courts. On it are spray-painted the words:  ‘Benjamin Netanyahu, take it and leave!’. Or as we would put it, ‘Netanyahu, pack your bags!’

Given that many blame the Israeli PM for failing to protect places like Netiv Ha’Asara, and his subsequent failure to get the hostages out of Gaza for nearly 15 months, those words carry even more weight.

That anger about Netanyahu was also palpable when we met Yotam Cohen, whose younger brother Nimrod, an Israeli soldier, was taken hostage by Hamas fighters on October 7.

Dispatched to try to fend off the attack, Nimrod’s tank was hit by rocket propelled grenades. The terrorists videoed the assault as three soldiers were killed. The injured Nimrod was grabbed and taken into Gaza where he has remained ever since.

When we met him in Jerusalem, Yotam brought along a laminated photo of his smiling brother and placed it on a chair, a presence and an absence at the same time.

He eloquently explained that the current ceasefire deal was the same as the one drafted last summer, meaning the hostages’ nightmare could and should have been ended much sooner.

Nimrod’s father Yehuda has led the regular protests against the Netanyahu government, even taking the rare step among Israelis of demanding the Prime Minister be arrested by the International Criminal Court.

But in yet another example of how usual norms have been warped in recent months, hostage families have been beaten by police for staying on the streets after their fellow protestors ebbed away.

We should never forget that the taking of hostages is itself a war crime. And the sickening spectacle of Hamas’s parading of the coffins of the dead rightly caused widespread revulsion in Israel when we were there.

If any proof were needed that Hamas terrorists prefer hatred to peace, it’s the fact that among their many victims were the very people who have spent a lifetime as peace builders. During our trip, it was confirmed that 84-year-old hostage Oded Lifshitz had been murdered, his body handed over as part of what his British-Israeli daughter Sharone Lifschitz as described as the “reality show from hell”.

Oded, who was taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz, had spent his life believing humanity was better than its hateful instincts. For many years he was a volunteer for the Road to Recovery charity, which drives desperately ill Palestinian children from Gaza checkpoints to hospitals in Israel. Just two weeks before being taken hostage, he had driven an ambulance to do just that.

In Netiv Ha’Asara, Roni Keidar is one of the few people to have returned to her home. The place is a moshav, an agricultural cooperative inhabited by many peace-loving progressives who had for years interacted with Gazans before the strip was turned into an open prison.

Sitting in her home, Roni handed out her new memoir, titled On The Border Of Hope, freshly arrived from the publisher that day. It’s the touching story of a Jewish girl who grew up in London, found love in Israel and emigrated.

Despite the trauma of the attack, Roni told us she still believed in peace and that respectful coexistence was the only way to guarantee security for both Israelis and Palestinians. Her plea was for people not just to talk about peace but to actively engage both sides, as she has done with youth drama and other groups. She is all too aware that she is among a minority who are ready to talk about a way forward.

One of the most moving sights on our trip was to the site of the Nova music festival, the place where Hamas gunned down, raped and mutilated so many Israeli young people whose only crime was to be having a good time on a religious holiday. The individual stories of each of the victims were truly heartbreaking.

Beyond row after row of photos of the victims were carpets of red anemones, poppy-like flowers that grow locally, a symbolic reminder of the worst bloodshed Israelis have suffered since the creation of their modern state.

At Kibbutz Nirim not far away, another site of the massacre, Avi Dabush, the chief executive for Rabbis for Human Rights, told us how he hid in a shelter on that night of horror. Yet Avi continues to be an advocate of peace and human rights for Palestinians, believing it is the only way to end the fear which many Israelis now feel so viscerally.

It was with Avi that we got the closest we could to Gaza itself. Ours was a fact-finding tour, but first hand experience of life in Gaza is impossible because no journalist, let alone Parliamentarians, are allowed in. Bearing witness to the atrocities wreaked upon the civilians of Gaza is still not permitted by Israel.

High up on a viewing platform that looks towards the Mediterranean, Gaza City was hazy in the distance.

Through a telescope and a close up on one fellow MP’s iPhone, what emerged was the stark image of the bombed out buildings and smashed streets of the war torn city. The bleak reality of the utter destruction wrought by the IDF came into focus too, a lifeless landscape without man, woman or child, only rubble and ruins.

It’s nearly 20 years since I was last in the West Bank and Jerusalem.  The old city is as beautiful as ever, the most extraordinary confluence of religions on the planet. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the spot where Jesus is said to have died and been resurrected, the Western Wall of the Second Temple and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, all still attract pilgrims, but amid heightened security.

Certainly, East Jerusalem feels much less Palestinian than ever before. Settler housing estates dominate the skyline and Israeli police and military are present throughout. More signs are in Hebrew, fewer signs are in Arabic.

We were told of increasing harassment of Christians, with Jewish settler boys spitting at clerics and nuns, even urinating on Christian homes and sites. While we were there, there was a report of an Israeli who attacked a 70-year-old woman with an axe in her home in the Old City, shouting “Christian!”, when in fact she turned out to be Israeli herself.

Outside the city, walled-off motorways now link Israeli settlements, hermetically sealed tubes of Israeli exclusivity that riddle the West Bank. The motorways are the arteries of the ever expanding organs of the illegal Israeli occupation, settlements that seek to permanently reduce the size and viability of a Palestinian state.

In Beit-Jala, a suburb of Bethlehem, Allegra Pacheco, an American human rights lawyer who works for the West Bank Protection Consortium (partly funded by the UK), showed us the latest maps – in this region maps dominate the discourse. They showed how the settlements are slowly and not so slowly squeezing Palestinian land and making the birthplace of Christ an increasingly restricted zone.

Leaving East Jerusalem through its roadblocks is itself a lesson in the asymmetry of power. It’s easy to leave, but very difficult to return. The long tailbacks for cars and vans trying to enter the city are a reminder of the daily reality for many Palestinians who have to spend hours queuing up simply to get to work.

Future peace will rely on economic regeneration of the West Bank. In Ramallah we the Bank of Palestine’s Kamel Husseini, who outlined just how much damage the war had caused to its balance sheet, and the ongoing difficulties of getting cash to Gazans.

The international community, particularly our financial sector, can help the bank’s finances. And Kamal pointed out that many Palestinians want to create new businesses, with even young Gazans still managing, against incredible odds, to work online on software and tech.

But the daily grind of just getting a phone line, an internet connection, of even travelling from A to B makes any trade or economic revival extremely difficult. In Ramallah, I had arranged a meeting with the Cooperative Union of Palestine and successive roadblocks meant it had taken one of their members more than three hours to travel from Nablus, just 45 miles away.

As the Labour and Cooperative MP for Rochdale, itself the birthplace of the cooperative movement, it’s important to me to build up strong links with cooperatives around the world. To mark the 180th anniversary of the founding of the Rochdale Pioneers last December, the Co-Op Group formed the Fund for International Co-operative Development.

2025 is also the UN’s International Year of the Cooperative, an attempt to promote all the vital work that grassroots cooperatives do in post-conflict zones, empowering local people to provide jobs, skills, trade and links between different communities.

Co-operatives have been a vibrant part of the Palestinian economy in both the West Bank and in Gaza. There are nearly 800 co-operatives covering agriculture, housing, banking, retail artisan crafts and credit unions.

The UK Co-Op refuses to stock any goods from illegal Israeli settlements and instead buys its olive oil and dates from Zaytoun, a Palestinian group whose producers are co-ops.

When I met Ezzedine Abu Taha, chair of the Palestine co-ops union, and his colleagues in their small office in Ramallah, they told me of the devastating impact of the war. Dr. Jihad Ramadan, Mr. Ayman al-hayh, Mrs. Siham Abbasi, Mrs. Randa Abd Rabbo and Mr. Ali Dar Saed, talked about their work. I was struck particularly by how women in particular play a key role in running savings and credit co-ops.

We were joined via Zoom by Dr Imad Abu al-Jadyan, of the Gaza cooperative action authority. Dr Imad is another inspiring figure, who tells of how of the 25 co-op HQ buildings in Gaza, just three have survived. The General Co-operative Union in Gaza City was obliterated. More than 85 per cent of the co-operative housing blocks have also been destroyed.

Yet the co-ops themselves survived. Their priority has been providing immediate aid relief for fellow Gazans living in tents. They also shared with me video footage of how, miraculously, amid the rubble in Gaza the agricultural co-op are growing seedlings for strawberries, peppers and aubergines, and trying to rebuild an income. These are literally green shoots of hope amid the despair.

I am determined to build links between UK co-ops and their Palestinian counterparts and have further online meetings with our friends there in coming weeks. We can have a direct impact I hope on improving conditions and working to a better future.

We need to build on the deep, historic connection both Palestinians and Israelis have with co-operative ways of working. Both peoples have for years been drawn to the self-help, community and identity that comes with being part of a co-op in a local area.

When we met the Prime Minister of Palestine, Mohammad Mustafa, in his office in Ramallah, he too stressed how the economy had to be a route to peace. An economist by trade, he said Hamas “has destroyed this country” but it was the Palestinian Authority’s job to ensured a brutalised population of young people had an alternative to war.

Briton Sir Michael Barber, who ran the No.10 Delivery Unit under the last Labour government, is helping the PA to reform itself to prepare for statehood. The Palestinian Prime Minister was grateful for our visit and for the UK’s support in suspending arms licences to Israel in Gaza, our backing for international law and support for UNRWA.

He knows his position is precarious, not least as many Palestinians are unhappy with the PA leadership. Yet he still believes a two-state solution is possible and hopes that the Arab world can come up with a plan the whole international community can get behind.

“They say there are three futures for Palestinian leaders: they’re killed, arrested or corrupted,” he smiled. “But I have no problem being an optimist. Being hopeless is not a privilege we Palestinians can have.”

One Palestinian leader who is not dead, is not seen as corrupted but was arrested many years ago, is Marwan Barghouti. By far the most popular Palestinian politician, polls show he would win a Presidential election by a landslide. But he is in jail, serving 5 life sentences for crimes he says he didn’t commit.

Barghouti has been in prison for 23 years, often in solitary confinement in a cell no bigger than a photobooth. Referred to by some as the ‘Mandela of the Middle East’, he has long been a passionate believer in a two-state solution. Key figures in Israel’s intelligence and security apparatus have for years seen him as a partner for peace. If he is released from jail, even if he has to live in exile, he could be the key that unlocks the puzzle of Israel-Palestine coexistence.

And perhaps one of the most sobering yet hopeful meetings we had in our entire visit was with Barghouti’s son Arab, who has been campaigning for his release at home and abroad. He set out the beatings his father suffered in jail and the lack of access to his family.

Yet his father remains committed to a political solution, and could be the one figure to unify different factional strands of Palestinian politics. “Our existence is our resilience,” he said.

More extreme elements in the Netanyahu government and Israeli police force certainly challenge that existence. On our tour, we visited the Educational Bookshop in Jerusalem, which had been raided by police weeks earlier after claims that one of the items it sold was a children’s colouring book titled ‘From the River to the Sea’.

The book, which was produced in South Africa and written in English, featured images of Nelson Mandela to colour in. Police claimed it was “inciteful material” and proceeded to ransack the shelves, putting scores of books with “nationalistic themes” into black plastic bags.

Morad Muna, brother of Mahmoud Muna, the arrested owner of the bookshop, told us how the police took any book that had a Palestinian flag on it and tried to translate it using Google Translate on their phones.

The Educational Bookshop is in fact a beacon of cross-community bridge-building, stocking Israeli and Palestinian books, as well as an impressive array of English classics and newspapers. Israeli human rights groups condemned the raid as an attempt to persecute Palestinian intellectuals and cultural life. The UK and other countries objected to raid too.

It’s not just bookshops under attack, however. One of the most worrying lurches towards authoritarianism in Israel is a new Parliamentary bill aimed at slapping a 80 per cent tax on all groups that receive more than half their donations from abroad. At a stroke that would dismantle not just humanitarian aid groups but also the legal aid and civil liberties groups who do invaluable work helping Palestinians.

Tania Hary, of Gisha, the Israeli rights group, Ivan Karakashian of the Norwegian Refugee Council, and a key worker from AIDA (Association of International Development Agencies) told us of the ongoing difficulties of aid agencies and charity staff being denied visas by Israel.

Although aid is now going back into Gaza, the arbitrary figure of 600 trucks a day was never made in consultation with aid agencies and many more are needed. There are also ongoing problems with the military restricting entry for some lorries, with rules on the height of the pallets suddenly changed.

To help the many children traumatised by what they’ve witnessed in Gaza, aid agencies supply not just food supplies but also “psycho-social support” (PSS) kits with toys and other items.

Yet in one of the more bizarre examples of Israeli restrictions, it appears that all of the shipments of PSS kits – which contain Lego bricks and books – have been blocked. Why? Because they were deemed by the Israeli authorities to be “unnecessary”. For many that will feel like just yet another needless, arbitrary decision aimed at showing who is in charge.

When our MP delegation met officials from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there was no doubting the unrepentant tone of the Netanyahu government’s approach to security after October 7.

The 80 per cent tax on civil liberties groups and the Gaza-style airstrikes and mass displacement of civilians in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank were defended uncompromisingly. Officials didn’t even use the phrase West Bank once, preferring to talk about Judea and Samaria.

It’s obvious that any possible future way forward has to take into account Israelis’ trauma and fundamental fears about their security.

But many Israelis also know their long-term security can only come from a lasting peace. They’re tired of the cycle of violence, of their young men and women having to spend the prime of their lives in military service.

The solutions are not simple, they’re complex and will take years. The term “political horizon” is even dismissed by some as empty phrase, just as the terminology of a “two-state solution” is seen by some on both sides as a 1990s relic of the failed Oslo era.

Yet the peacebuilders keep on going. In Jerusalem, lawyer Danny Seiddeman showed us an extraordinary model of the city, with different coloured lights marking Muslim, Jewish and Christian archeology. He has proposed to King Charles and others that there is a way of turning the Old City into an internationally protected site of religious significance.

A group called ALLMEP, the Alliance for Middle East Peace, is campaigning for a multi-billion dollar reconstruction fund to peacebuilders, modelled deliberately on the International Fund for Ireland that pumped money into Northern Ireland to help cement the peace process.

In Jerusalem, we met ALLMEP representatives, alongside activists like Heli Mishal, of the Israeli social movement Standing Together that protests in favour of a peaceful future for Israelis and Palestinians, and Mohammad Hadith of the group ACT Conflict Resolution.

We also met Robi Damelin, of the Parents’ Circle. A remarkable pensioner, Robi lost her son to a Palestinian sniper’s bullet, an event that led her to campaign for peace to prevent other parents going through the same agony. “We need your help,” she said.

The UK government has done much more than the previous government to support the Palestinian people, particularly on suspending arms licences to Gaza, giving aid to UNRWA and medical charities and backing the independence of the ICC after it issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas leaders.

Yet there is much more we can do to help. We need to support Palestinian co-ops and banks to rebuild from the grassroots. The Home Office can issue more visas to Palestinian children with British links in desperate need of medical evacuation.

The UK can use its power as a UN Security Council member to work with allies like France and Saudi Arabia to help build international alliances on the next steps for the region.

We can impose more sanctions against organisations that support illegal Israeli settlers. We have to implement the consequences of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) landmark ruling that Israel’s occupation is illegal. The UK is already helping to train the police and military of the Palestinian Authority but it can do more on this to provide the stability and security that Israelis feel they need more than ever.

Although the extremes often appear to be in charge in Israel, polls of ordinary Israelis show majorities against Netanyahu’s lurch to authoritarianism, and even a majority for a two-state solution if security needs can be met.

One poll found that 60 per cent of the Israeli public would prefer Donald Trump to promote a political-security arrangement that includes normalisation with Arab states including Saudi Arabia “and agreeing to establish a Palestinian state”. That’s nearly twice the 31 per cent who would prefer “full annexation of the West Bank”.

This trip was a brief tour of the region, but I returned with a strong duty to amplify the testimony of those we met.

That testimony included the pain of the hostage families. Not just their natural revulsion at the wickedness of Hamas, but also their cold anger at a Prime Minister who they believe has prolonged their agony and who is an obstacle to any long term progress.

It also included the pain of the Palestinian people, who suffer collective punishment every day for the sins of Hamas terrorists. They have shown extraordinary resilience despite decades of mistreatment as second class citizens in what should be their own state, and despite expanding settlements and settler violence that pose a major risk of future cycles of violence. “We aren’t going anywhere,” was how the Palestinian Prime Minister put it.

When asked for her message to the British people about the fate of Israelis and Palestinians, Roni Keidar said something that will remain with me. “Tell them there are many people like me who do think there is room for both of us,” she said. “If we keep saying ‘it’s either us or them’, eventually there will be neither us nor them.”

Paul Waugh MP, February 2025