On Wednesday in Rafah, the Gaza border town now transformed in effect into a vast sprawling refugee camp, airstrikes reportedly killed more than a dozen members of one family. Among the dead, according to Reuters, was a one-year-old girl. On the same day, the UK airdropped food and medicines into Gaza for the first time, from a Jordanian plane, in response to a growing humanitarian disaster. Meanwhile, the Labour MP Sarah Champion – who chairs the international development select committee, newly returned from a fact-finding visit to the Egyptian side of the border – reported that “nothing that has been reported braces you for the true scale of the horror in Gaza”, adding that she was personally afraid UN workers might have to pull out due to the deteriorating security situation.
That could have been parliament’s focus on Wednesday, but instead it tied itself up in knots over a vote that achieved little beyond leaving MPs feeling badly bruised, parliament diminished and the country mostly confused. We could spend all day arguing over whose fault that was – who was playing games over whose amendment, in pursuit of whose imagined advantage in which marginal seat – but to do so seems obscenely parochial in the circumstances.
