This week, MP for Bradford East David Ward was hauled over the coals for remarks he had made about understanding the cycle of violence that has scarred Palestine and the world. 

Just hours after Ward made a public apology for any distress his views may have caused, the city of Bradford came together in a moving candlelight vigil for the victims of the most recent attacks on Gaza. 

The emotional and dignified protest was led by campaigners Liz Dunn and Bridget Rees, who read out the names of hundreds of children who have died over the past few weeks.

As their words echoed across the water of the iconic mirror pool in Bradford City Park, tears filled the eyes of all who were present at this moving and humble ceremony. 

But the bombs continued to land on homes, schools and hospitals in Gaza. There is no peace in Palestine tonight, and nor has there been on any other night since the shelling started again. 

Another 17 children died as Bradford prayed.

In Bradford, hundreds left the mosques to take part in an outdoor tirawih, a series of readings that take place every night during Ramadan. 

As the call to prayer rang through the streets, people of all faiths, creeds and colours came together out of a need to stop the carnage. 

Rees has a particular connection with Palestine. On September 29 1944, her father Carlyle Witton-Davies packed his bags and set off on an incredible journey which would shape the lives of him and his family for generations. 

Witton-Davies, a renowned Hebrew scholar and Anglican priest, had been dispatched to Jerusalem to take up a position as canon to the Cathedral of Jerusalem and special adviser on Jewish affairs. 

In his diary he recorded: “Up early 6.15am to catch 7.37 train from Buckley Junction. Said farewell to little Bridget, grandpa and grandma” — and he joined the thousands who were flocking to Palestine as the war in Europe concluded. 

The family later joined him and spent seven years in Jerusalem from 1944 to 1951.

Witton-Davies’s diaries record the origins of today’s conflict. 

For Rees, the experience as a young child of being constantly moved, evacuated and witnessing the bloodshed first-hand have marked her. 

Seventy years later, Bridget remains haunted by the death and destruction that she witnessed all those years ago.

Witton-Davies kept copious diaries of his time in Jerusalem and the faded red manila-bound notebooks are among Rees’s most precious possessions. Each time she reads them she finds something new in her father’s terse shorthand account of one of the most violent periods in modern history. 

The British forces were based in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and 92 people died when in 1946 the zionist Stern Gang bombed the building, which housed the nerve centre of British rule in Palestine. Witton-Davies buried the bodies.

His diaries record the day-to-day business of living with the uncertainty of a war without protocols. 

Rees says: “You just get another outrage and another outrage.” 

Her father details the increasingly indiscriminate violence as villages and towns were occupied. 

An entry for April 13 1949 says: “The Klein family departed for Haifa en route to the states. Given description of massacre in villages at Dien Yassin outside Jerusalem. A loud explosion set off a battery in this district.”

Rees arrived in Jerusalem as a toddler and grew up enchanted by the hustle and bustle of the ancient, eastern city so different from Pembrokeshire where she was born. 

Her father used to ring the church bell in his pyjamas first thing in the morning. 

She remembers the noise of different faiths and languages as people went about their lives. 

When Rees came back to London some years later, she asked her mother where were the donkeys were in this cold, and in so many ways distant, land where she grew up.

Rees and her sisters would frequently find themselves on the move. She recalls having to hurriedly grab her toys while the Dome of the Rock went up in flames. 

She recalls: “The shells landed in our flat. We weren’t there, we had been evacuated. We were evacuated a lot — to Oman, Syria, Jordan, Rome, to Cyprus and back to England.” 

Rees remembers that part of her childhood as being strange, of being constantly on the move, travelling around the Middle East and Europe on trains to escape the killing.

She says: “I remember the noise and the bombs and the shootings. I can’t go to a firework display to this day. Any kind of sudden noise — a balloon popping or anything like that… 

“Towards the end of our time there, it was the Nakba — the Israelis call it the war of independence — there were quite a lot of unexploded bombs and we had to get out into the garden and wait. I remember waiting there and hearing as it exploded. I remember that really clearly,” she says. 

But some experiences were repressed, too much for a child to take.

Her memories “are just little flashes,” she says. “That’s what memories are.” 

But in 1992 Rees and her sister returned to Palestine and stayed at the St George Hotel where they had lived as children. 

She says: “We were given the ground floor, just where we used to go up to what had been our flat. I went in and went: ‘My God, that’s the room where I heard the bomb.’ 

Her memories flooded back, unlocking an experience which Rees, like her father, had buried in the detail of her day-to-day life. 

As she walked into a room that she recognised in the hotel, something triggered and she just froze. Her immediate thought was: “There is blood here. But there is no blood here. Someone got killed here.” 

She asked her mother what had happened and was told that she could not know anything about it. 

Rees saw the death of a young boy replay over and over and for years, but was unsure if it was memory or one of the nightmares that she still experiences from those early traumatic experiences in Jerusalem. 

Rees now lives in a typical Yorkshire village on the edge of the moors. The land rises up outside her cottage. 

It’s a million miles from Gaza, but Rees’s heart is in Palestine and, as she watches the story of another massacre, she is transported back in time. Among the butterflies and buddleia in the garden, she reads to me from her father’s diaries. 

In the late afternoon sunshine, she unfolds the tale of an incredible journey from her early beginnings in the Middle East to this peaceful rural escape and it’s clear that in 60 years time, the children that survive — if any at all do — will not emerge unscathed.