Réada Cronin (Kildare North, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate the strong words from the Minister, Deputy Coveney, regarding the horror unfolding in Gaza. They are a dignified change from those of his predecessor during the assault on Gaza in 2014. Strong words are necessary from Ireland, a country that was occupied and knows the cosh of the coloniser. This week, Gaza is awash with anguish. There are reports that 60% of electricity lines are down. Water pipes have been destroyed by Israeli bombing and tens of thousands of people have no access to clean drinking water. A Médecins Sans Frontières clinic has been destroyed, Red Crescent operations are severely disrupted and a Covid testing laboratory was wiped out. Some 48,000 people are crammed into schools, which the UN hopes will be protected this time by the blue flags flying overhead. That is not always the case.

There are reports of families sleeping together in one room so that, if they are bombed, they will die together. In the rubble of their home, a brother and sister found their pet goldfish. In the rubble of his home, Riyad Eshkuntana was not so lucky. His wife and four of his children were killed. Only his daughter Suzy was pulled alive from the wreckage of their home, now the wreckage of their lives. Suzy is six years old. Her younger brother Yehya was four. Yet Israel tells the world it is targeting armed terrorists. As I wrote this speech, I had to keep updating the number for the deaths of children. In Israel, there were two. In Gaza, 40 became 50, 50 became 60 and we are now at 65. Eleven of those children were receiving trauma counselling when they were killed. Yet Israel claims it is the victim as the normal service of evicting, settling, displacing, degrading, threatening, annexing, arresting, shooting and beating turns with depressing regularity to bombing. In this perverse logic, condemning the razing of Palestine and its people is deemed anti-Semitic. It is not. Nor is condemning the Israeli Government for its excessive force and its murder of children. Likewise, the descendants of Holocaust survivors protesting Israel's violence against the Palestinians is not anti-Semitic.

The Kildare bard, Christy Moore, sang: "[They] tell us who suffer the tear gas and the torture that we're in the wrong." The Palestinian people are in the wrong in shelters, on the beach, in schools, in trauma counselling and in what they hoped, like Riyad Eshkuntana, were safe spaces. They are in the wrong in childhood. I say to the terrified people of Gaza today that as a country that knows occupation, Ireland is with them in heart, soul and spirit. Four years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War and the capture of Palestinian lands, the Israeli conductor and peacemaker, Daniel Barenboim, warned Israel that its occupation had "eroded all sense of decency and humanity and morality from people like me, who had been persecuted for over 20 centuries".

The tide is turning and the world is watching. The Minister should tell his partners on the UN Security Council, that, as was said by my leader Deputy McDonald earlier, we see them. We see them.

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