The Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran has told of her fears for relatives in the Gaza Strip, who she said were unable to move to safety inside what she described as an “open-air prison”.
The party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, who became the UK’s first MP of Palestinian heritage when she was elected in 2017, said extended family had been forced to seek sanctuary in a church after their house was hit by an Israeli bomb following the Hamas attacks.
She was giving an interview on Good Morning Britain, after which the presenter Richard Madeley faced criticism for having asked “with your family connections in Gaza, did you have any indication of what was going to happen” before Hamas’s attacks.
Moran responded: “Not this, not this. Everyone, everyone has been surprised first of all by the timing and sophistication and the way that it’s happened.”
Madeley faced calls to apologise, including from Liz Jarvis, the Lib Dem candidate for Eastleigh in Hampshire, who said the question was “appalling”.
Making a plea for the opening of humanitarian corridors, Moran said it was impossible for her elderly relatives to move to a place of safety where they would not be caught up in Israeli strikes on Hamas targets.
“That’s the problem with the geography of Gaza as a whole. It’s essentially an open prison, so you wouldn’t be able to move easily from one place to another,” she said. “They have heard that there are convoys of people trying to move that have also been hit and they just don’t feel it’s safe to move.”
Moran, whose immediate family are Palestinian Christians in the West Bank, and who has extended family in Gaza, said she and her sister were attempting to get news of their relatives every day. They were running out of food and had already been reduced to drinking dirty water.
“I don’t believe it’s right that my family are being held accountable for what Hamas has done,” added the MP, who said she “totally understands” that Israel had to find a way to tackle Hamas.
Israel had to take action in a way that did not affect ordinary civilians, she said, as she warned that events now risked perpetuating a conflict that she said had been 100 years in the making.
“This is a cycle of violence. My worry now is that this is radicalising another generation on all sides. We have to stop this hatred. We have to bring people together and find a way through.”
Expressing the hope that a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be kept alive – “the only silver lining that could come from this” – she recalled visiting the region a year ago. “The people we met were Israeli peace activists and it’s some of them that have been taken hostage and it’s absolutely wrong,” she said.
Moran also told how she had gone to a vigil in Oxford with Jewish people in her constituency, adding: “I went there because they are the only ones who feel what I am feeling. They share that grief, and what a horrible thing to have in common.”
