Recently returned from my second visit to Palestine I am pleased about this but more depressed than ever about the situation there.

As I said in Parliament last week, things there are much worse than they were before.

Gaza is a living hell: 80 per cent are unemployed, 80 per cent dependent on food aid and 80 per cent of businesses have closed in the last eight months.

With petrol at $7 a litre only horses and donkeys were available to deliver food to those who needed it.

By blocking cement and concrete from entering Gaza the Israelis are stopping homes from being built and the bomb-damaged sewage works from being repaired.

By refusing wounded children permission to enter Israel for medical treatment they are condemning them to death.

I met a 14-year old who had lost an arm and most of his abdomen to an Israeli shell.

And by limiting the import of fuel they have stopped the Gazans from fishing and put the major hospital's future on a knife edge.

The Palestinian minority who lob pathetic bombs over the border achieve nothing except retaliation from superior military forces.

So the economic strangulation of the West Bank continues. Illegal and exclusive roads, illegal settlements and the illegal wall are all being built apace by an Israeli Government which has no legal right to operate there.

Bethlehem, Jerusalem and the other places we visited were sad, but Gaza was a nightmare.

It is half the size of High Peak yet home to one and a half million people.

It is not so much an open prison, more a waiting room for a graveyard; except there is no wood left from which to build coffins.