Letters | 24 May 2018

Desperation in Gaza

Sir: I must respond to Rod Liddle’s opinion on Gaza (‘Why this deluded affection for the Palestinians?’, 19 May). I was in Shifa hospital for two quiet Fridays during the initial protests. Eighty-five per cent of bullet wounds were around the knee; the result of accurate sniper targeting. The first casualty I saw was a prepubertal boy with a bullet through the head; the first operation, a prepubertal boy with smashed bones and artery from a high velocity bullet that resulted in amputation. These were children. Their elder brothers have never left Gaza, and half are unemployed, living with contaminated water and with electricity for only six hours a day. Twenty per cent feel they would be better off dead (according to Pam Bailey’s project We Are Not Numbers), but suicide is not an option in Islam. Their parents were traders but most of these businesses are bust.

I have visited since 2016, but it is only recently that the desperation has broken through their ironic sense of humour and stoical endurance. A godsend for the Al Kassam brigades, Al Aksa Martyrs and Islamic Jihad.
John H.N. Wolfe FRCS

Bridport, Dorset

The purpose of railways

Sir: I cannot agree with Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion (Any other business, 19 May) that Deutsche Bahn ought to be invited to pick up the ‘poisoned chalice’ of the East Coast Main Line as the likeliest answer to all of that blighted service’s chronic problems. Much as I know the German railway operator to be efficient and competent in its own country, its subsidiary, DB Regio, had a far from satisfactory track record in running the Tyne and Wear metro system in recent years. Appointed in 2010, its contract was not renewed in 2017, and our light rail system is now being directly operated by Nexus, the passenger transport executive of the North East Combined Authority of local councils.

The nationalisation of the railways in 1948 was a godsend to the private operators such as the LNER, all of which had struggled for decades to make any profit and had been kept afloat by government subsidies during the two world wars.