I arrived exhausted at Heathrow on Friday night from a week in the West Bank and Gaza, in Palestine- touring, meeting numerous representatives of the UN, humanitarian organisations, the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli government. Like most people concerned by the appalling suffering experienced on both sides during this sixty year old conflict, I am clear that only a ‘two-state solution’ offers the prospect of enduring peace- that is, a viable and independent Palestine alongside the state of Israel. Whether or not this did genuinely come with reach after the Oslo agreement in the 1990s and the subsequent negotiations at Camp David is a moot point. What is less disputable is just how far away from a ‘viable, independent’ Palestine we seem to be today. Equally obvious are the extent of the humanitarian crisis affecting the Palestinian people, especially though not exclusively, in the Gaza strip, and the corrosive impact of military occupation upon millions of people either locked inside a 30km by 5km prison (Gaza), or subject to a military checkpoint and security regime of unendurable restriction.

The second Palestinian intifada, begun in 2000, has left an agonising legacy in Israel Suicide bombings on buses, streets and clubs butchered nearly 200 innocent civilians and cast a pall of fear over the entire country. Our delegation visited a Sderot, an Israeli village where rockets fired out of Gaza land daily, taking a regular toll of civilian deaths- we saw the damage caused by a rocket which grazed the side of a school. Israeli civilians have every right to security, to protection against attack, and as a democracy, the government must respond to this legitimate demand.

Yet the price of security is a devastatingly high one for the Palestinian people. Thousands of people have died, including over 800 children. Over a million people in Gaza are locked in behind the prison walls of the new security fence, without the ability to move beyond those walls to work or maintain personal connections. As a result, two-thirds of the adults are out of work, and 1 million people are subsisting on food aid provided by the United Nations. We met businessman who reported truck loads of fruit and vegetables intended for export left to rot for days at the security crossing; and others for whom orders have dried up because they can never guarantee when they can get their goods cleared. Paper for children in UN-run schools has not been allowed in. In Bethlehem, 25 foot-high concrete slabs slice through one of the world’s most cherished heritage sites. In Hebron we saw the old market, once the town’s beating heart, has become a ghost town, with streets ‘sterilised’ by the army to the point where those Palestinians remaining cannot leave their homes by the front door. Internal checkpoints on the West Bank, and the checks at the security fence, add hours to the simplest journey; freedom of movement is non-existent for many, and plausible stories of humiliation, abuse and worse are commonplace.

Setting aside, for a moment, the aesthetics of the security wall surrounding Gaza and much of the West Bank, there may be a case for a secure ‘international’ boundary between Palestine and Israel. Secure border are not unusual. The point, however, is where should this be? Surely, it should follow the internationally agreed ‘green line’- but it does not. In part, this is because of Israeli security assessments, which are, in turn, rendered infinitely more complicated by the breathtaking scale of recent Israeli settlements on land within Palestine. These settlements, many constructed since the Oslo peace process began, and growing by the day, are served by private roads, cutting through Palestine, but from which Palestinians are excluded, and they enjoy military or equivalent private security. It is hard to avoid the question: How is an independent Palestine viable with its land divided and with a foreign army on its soil?

My brief visit, and this even briefer sketch, cannot do justice to a complex and tragic situation. Nothing is inevitable, and the renewed attention of the world community in the build up to this autumn’s peace conference is welcome, What seems obvious, however, is that the humanitarian problems cannot wait for a permanent political solution, and that the political solution itself may only be in the next room, but the door to that room- a heavy door of 25 foot high concrete slabs topped with barbed wire- appear to be closing.