Andy Slaughter in Gaza

Our MP is currently on a fact-finding trip to Gaza, with other parliamentarians from all parties in the UK. I blogged on his last trip here. Here's what he's been up to:

Several parliamentary representatives and I travelled to Egypt on Thursday morning as part of a cross parliamentary delegation visit to Gaza. The group includes members of different political parties such as David Steel and Karen Buck, who were also present a year ago when we were part of the first delegation to visit Gaza after the Israeli occupation. Part of our aim is to see how things have changed over the year and what necessary steps the British government must take to end the humanitarian crisis in the region.

We left Cairo at 4:30 this morning for the long drive to the border. As we neared the border, checkpoints became increasingly frequent but the Egyptian authorities were by and large very helpful and friendly. We found as time went on that if we admitted Peter Crouch’s second goal had been offside, we made significantly quicker progress! Our final checkpoint was at the Rafeh terminal, which to our surprise took only 2 hours to get through; nowhere near the 8 hours it had taken last year entering from the Israeli side.

Read it all here