Derek Cooper and his wife, Pamela (obituary, July 14, 2006) spent their lives in the desolate trouble spots of the Middle East, bringing aid to refugees, children in particular. Having been shocked by what they saw of the plight of the Palestinian refugees in Jordan in 1959 and done all they could to bring succour where possible, they won the support of King Hussein – and also the profound suspicion of successive Israeli governments.

They were better known in Israel than in England, or in Ireland, where they eventually made their home. Seldom can a couple, who might have lived a quiet life in the countryside they loved, have given more of themselves for the sake of others.

George Derek Cooper was born in Bromley, Kent, the son of Stanley Cooper whose principal family fortune was derived from London horse-drawn and later motor buses. He was educated at Eastbourne College and, having failed the Royal Navy eyesight test, joined a marine engineering and dredging company in Greenwich.

In 1932, he went to Haifa to help with a harbour-dredging contract. During rioting by the Arab population in protest against the immigration of European Jews, he enrolled as a special constable in the Palestine Police, thereby gaining his first experience of the Arab and Jewish struggle for their homeland.

Having fought in the North West European campaign with the 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment, Cooper was sent to Palestine with the Life Guards in January 1948. The British Government had just announced its intention to end the Mandate and withdraw.

Widespread acts of terror by the Jewish terrorist organisations Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang were making the country ungovernable, and all attempts to regulate Jewish immigration to manageable proportions were pilloried in the US press.

Cooper’s final act before the British withdrawal in May 1948 was an attempt, with a scratch force of armoured cars, infantry and a handful of tanks, to hold back the Jewish fighters who were driving the Arabs out of Jaffa.

Cooper was awarded the Military Cross for his courage and resolute handling of the situation in Jaffa and might have decided to continue with a promising military career if he had not fallen in love with the beautiful widowed Pamela, Viscountess Ruthven – while he was still married himself.

This created an awkward dilemma which cast a cloud over his future in the Life Guards, but it might have been dealt with sympathetically had he not lost patience and resigned his commission in 1952. Once divorced, he married the second Pamela in his life – his first wife had the same name – and the couple set up home in the depths of Donegal.

Curiously, although the Suez crisis put the Middle East on centre stage in 1956, it was the Hungarian uprising that provided the inspiration for the Coopers to devote the rest of their active lives to the plight of refugees. News of the stream of people pouring into Austria from Hungary decided them to do something to help, so they bought a Land Rover and set out for Austria under the auspices of the Save the Children Fund. Based in the Burgenland frontier region, they spent the winter ferrying refugees back from the frontier and, later, Cooper took part in operations to help many of them cross over from Hungary.

Their next mission took them to Irbid, in northern Jordan, where the Save the Children Fund was having difficulty tending the many thousands of Arabs living in refugee camps, often under most rudimentary conditions. Cooper and his wife administered the SCF clinics around Irbid from the spring of 1960 until December 1961, when Cooper was awarded the Istiqlal Medal of Independence by King Hussein in recognition of their work.

Following the earthquake in Iran on September 1, 1962, in which more than 12,000 people were killed and 22,000 made homeless, Cooper took charge of the SCF involvement until the following February. Four years later, when Israel’s preemptive strike of the Six-Day War led to the defeat of Egypt, Jordan and Syria and the further displacement of one and a half million refugees, Cooper sent a telegram to King Hussein offering assistance in any capacity.

On June 25 he flew to Jordan to become the co-ordinator of the British Aid to Jordan Fund in Amman. The conditions in which he found the refugees appalled him and led to a seven-year involvement with attempts to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian refugees.

His wife joined him for much of this time to act as his co-ordinator and secretary, editing his scribbled notes on circumstances in the various camps into concise and intelligible reports to the Fund. He found a so-called “camp” near Suweileh where 30,000 refugees had simply paused on wet ploughland, having fled Israeli bombing of the Jordan valley.

He carried out surveys of Palestinian refugee conditions for Oxfam during 1973-75 and for the International Committee for Palestine Human Rights 1975-76, both missions that brought him into conflict with the Israeli authorities whenever it became necessary for him and his wife to visit the occupied territories or to pass through the port of Haifa. Twice he was ordered to report to the Israeli police and interrogated before release. Later, he was appointed OBE for his work for the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Whatever the tribulations endured by the Coopers in their efforts to bring aid to refugees, they were nothing compared with the hazards they met following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. When Cooper and his wife were asked to go there as the Oxfam representatives in Beirut, they were aged 70 and 72 respectively and might have been thought of as having done all that could reasonably be asked of them. But they went anyway. The Coopers became involved in the saving of lives, as well as struggling to organise the survival of those under immediate threat.

Achieving brief ceasefire agreements was the essential preliminary to moving people. On August 10, 1982, the couple set up a combined Oxfam and SCF operation to move 27 disabled children from a hospital in a devastated area of the Sabra district to a place of comparative safety. Minutes only remained for them to get the children out and Cooper took one tiny child in his arms and climbed into their Land Rover as the last seconds of the ceasefire ticked by. The shelling restarted as the group got away.

In the interval before the Coopers returned to Beirut, “Medical Aid for Palestinians” was formed and Cooper became its chairman in 1984. They returned in 1987, working with Dr Mary McCracken and the dedicated surgeon Dr Pauline Cutting. This was the period of the Beirut hostage-taking and no Westerner was safe outside the security of a hotel. They took any opportunity of a lull in the fighting to visit refugee camps outside the capital, but it was a heartbreaking struggle against disease and injuries brought about by prejudice and political obduracy.

Long after they were too old to work for the cause of the Palestinian refugees, the couple returned to Israel in 1995 to see how matters stood. Following a quiet lunch in Bethlehem with an Arab veteran of the fighting in the last weeks of the British Mandate, Cooper reflected: “We gave away the freehold when we only had a leasehold.”

His marriage in 1937 to Pamela Armstrong-Lushington-Tulloch was dissolved in 1951. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage and by two stepsons, the elder of whom is the present Earl of Gowrie.

Major Derek Cooper, OBE, MC, soldier and worker for Palestinian refugees, was born on May 28, 1912. He died on May 19, 2007, aged 94