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

I want to recognise how the Irish people, through us, stand by Palestine. I will return to the actions that I want us to take but, first, I want to talk specifically about the children of Palestine.

They are children like our own, who love to play out the back or out the front, or to kick a ball on the beach. Those same children, who, when not dying of fright by air attacks are killed outright or when they are not being mutilated by a rocket or a gun, are watching these same things happen to their parents, their grandparents, their siblings, usually at close quarter right in front of their eyes, or are being terrorised by Israeli security forces or are being detained themselves.

Every year between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are detained, charged and prosecuted by the Israeli justice system. Some as young as 12, their parents still do as we do, measuring their height on a doorframe and not knowing when they will be able to make the next mark. They are detained mostly for stone-throwing against the most hi-tech, self-called "moral" army in the world. The irony of David and Goliath transposed.

These are the same children who see their schools, that the EU and UN pay for, razed, their neighbourhoods raided, their water supplies cut off, their streets dug up, and their ambulances prevented from reaching the wounded, the elderly, women in labour and babies needing help; war crimes.

These are the children wandering dazed into the night because, when their refugee camp is cleared, as in Jenin, they had nowhere to go; refugees seeking refuge from a refugee camp. It beggars belief what these young children are forced to experience. They watch their grandparents weeping as their olive trees, some centuries old, are bulldozed while those committing this psychological and social atrocity laugh on or they see the homes of those same grandparents and great-grand parents taken over and occupied by Israeli settlers. This is their reality day in, day out - occupation, degradation and segregation removing the sacred vestiges of childhood.

I beg the Government to act for these children, to give these children hope, to recognise the state of Palestine, to progress the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill 2018, to move on my colleague, Deputy Brady's, Bill that would see the Irish Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, divest from companies doing business in the occupied territories. It must stop waiting for the EU to act. Ireland should lead on this and let others follow.

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