Mark Wheeler and Amanda Brown, increasingly upset about the situation in Gaza, sent a letter to Fylde MP Andrew Snowden asking him to challenge the Labour Government to “use every means possible to end the genocide against the Palestinian people”.
The couple received a reply from the opposition Conservative MP, Andrew Snowden MP, who was the former Police and Crime Commissioner for Lancashire.
However they felt that they were just given the party line and not a reply to their actual request, so they sent a second letter, but have so far not received a reply to that letter from the MP.
The first letter they sent
In their first letter, they wrote:
As our duly elected representative we ask you to use your position as a representative of His Majesties opposition to question the government as to why they are not using every means possible to end the genocide against the Palestinian people.
The Israelis are now using quadcopters, controlled by a person in a room, to target children and shoot them. The children that Dr Rose treated were between 5 years and 15 years old. Any younger [children] were picked up by parents to escape. Any older [children] could run away to escape. This particular age range became confused and were more easily targeted.
When asked what effect her Gaza experiences had on her, she was remarkably precise. Her daily life at Kings College Hospital regularly dealt with acute traumas that she could do something about. In Gaza she cannot stop the traumas, killings and tragedies. Only the Israelis are in a position to stop it all, whenever they like.
She felt that the majority of the British public want the UK to stop any support for Israel, but feels that it is higher up the political level where the resistance to sanctions occurs.
What triggered them to write?
Mark said:
There was no specific moment to trigger my letters, just a gradual build up of anger and frustration at the lack of political response. The BBC cancelling the ‘Doctors under Attack’ documentary didn’t help.
I did not keep the reply from Andrew [to my first letter] because he didn’t address the issue and was quite clearly saying what he had been told to say by the party Whip.
It showed a detachment as a human being to the atrocities being committed and as many other politicians and media organisations have shown, to fail to use the word ‘genocide’.
Only Al Jazeera has been consistent in their coverage and changed their headline from ‘War in Gaza’ to ‘Genocide in Gaza’.
As a result Western politicians and media are complicit and show a remarkable lack of independent thinking.
Despite attempts by the Local Democracy Service and North West Bylines to contact Mr Snowden over the letters, he has not yet responded.
The long standing conflict has now escalated badly
The current situation in Israel is part of an ongoing conflict between the nation state and Hamas, an organisation which has been termed an Islamic resistance movement by some, and a terrorist group by others.
It concerns hostilities over the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, following previous wars since the state of Israel was founded in May 1948, and Israel’s occupation of those territories which started in 1967.
Since Hamas assumed control over the Gaza Strip, it has been involved in multiple conflicts with Israel. The latest began on 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched a coordinated land, sea, and air assault on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
More than 1,000 Hamas militants stormed into southern Israel and launched an attack, killing 1,200 men, women and children and abducting another 250 people to take back to Gaza.
The incident, described as the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust, provoked a full scale response from Israel, which is still continuing with ongoing attacks on the territory.
Since the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s response, it has been reported that over 57,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, over half of them women and children, and more than 137,000 injured.
UK Government position
The UK Government has recently strongly condemned Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza, while also criticising the Hamas attack, but the Goverment has been accused of supporting Israel in the early days of the 2023 conflict and not doing enough to try and halt the current crisis.
After an LDRS press release by Richard Hunt
