Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

If the citizens of Europe were asked today if they thought they are being treated in a fair manner by governments in Europe, I believe a large majority would say "No". If they were asked if they thought the Palestinians were being treated fairly by the international community, the answer would be the same.

The launch of this latest attack on a defenceless civilian society should be of great concern to anybody who is concerned about international law and humanitarian law. A diplomatic alternative existed in this situation. Hamas had agreed to an informal truce but a peaceful alternative appears to have been rebuffed. Western media have ignored this and, instead, we receive a misleading presentation of the issue from President Obama. His defence of Israel's behaviour in the last week is nothing short of a disgrace. The imminence of the Israeli elections is clearly a big factor. Spilling the blood of children in the interests of electoral gain is nothing new on the planet but, sadly, there is a huge silence from the international community.

With regard to fairness, today's Financial Times points out that in military terms the conflict between Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement could not be more unequal. Examining the sequence of events over the past month shows that Israel played a decisive role in the military escalation - the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in October, the shooting of a mentally disabled Palestinian in early November, the killing of a 13 year old during an Israeli incursion and, crucially, the assassination of the Hamas commander, Ahmed Jabari, last Wednesday during negotiations on a temporary truce. After six days of sustained assault by the world's fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, more than 130 Palestinians have been killed, half of them estimated to be civilians, as well as five Israelis. That is more than 25 to one in terms of deaths. In the past eight and a half years, when rockets were fired from Gaza to Israel, a total of 28 people, including the five last week, have been killed. There is no comparison. It is mind-boggling to consider that a rocket from Palestine costs approximately €300 while the ones coming from Israel cost €47,000.

The issue is not just about who started and escalated the conflict. The portrayal of Israel as some type of victim with every right to defend itself from attack from outside its borders is a grotesque inversion of reality.

Israel has been in illegal occupation for the past 45 years of the West Bank and Gaza, where most of the population are the families of refugees driven out in 1948 of what is now Israel. The interior minister, Eli Yishai, insisted Gaza needs to be sent back to the Middle Ages.

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