James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I send my sympathies to the families of Kim Damti and Emily Hand, as the Tánaiste did at the start of this debate and my colleagues the Minister of State, Deputy Byrne, and Deputy Phelan also did. I agree with much, although perhaps not all, of what Deputy Phelan said.

The first casualty of war is truth. Not surprisingly, it has become a casualty quickly, including in this arena today. I have lost track of the various accounts of the hospital bombing that happened last night. It was horrific. That hardly needs to be said. However, reports came from Islamic Jihad, the Israelis and Hamas, and again from the Israelis, and they are now back to saying that a parking lot adjacent to the hospital was hit and not the hospital at all. I do not know because reporters are not allowed on the ground to tell us what is really happening. It is hard to keep track of the fast-moving situation. A collective media has a duty to probe, analyse and understand what is happening before we form conclusions. Any breaches of international law are unacceptable. Bunreacht na hÉireann upholds basic civil rights. Ireland is a member of the European Union and is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which both enshrine fundamental human rights in our system. International law must be upheld and I condemn any violation of that.

The second casualty of war might be compassion or justice. A cognitive dissonance was referred to by Deputy Phelan, where some of us think before we see and formulate our opinions based on what side we perceive ourselves as being on as opposed to what has actually happened. We saw that on 7 October. I was shocked to see a huge upsurge of support for the Palestinian people. I support the Palestinian people, but my first reaction to the slaughter of 1,400 Israelis in their kibbutzim, at music festivals and in their beds was not to start shouting for "the other side". I do not think it is the other side. Hamas, which is a theocratic, far-right organisation, is solely to blame. It has very little in common with the far left, yet the two seem at times to converge. The worst fears of the 1,400 people who were slaughtered were realised.

When I hear words such as "genocide", "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes" being thrown around, I am reminded of where I heard them before. I heard them when I visited Auschwitz earlier this year and when I read about the Wannsee Conference. We know how the Jewish people arrived in Israel - that borders were redrawn after the Second World War - and what they went through to get there. It is worth putting on the record that they are not colonisers in the traditional sense. They do not have another homeland to go to. They did not come from somewhere else to take over a colony. They cannot go back to a mother ship. The Jewish people's land is traditionally in the Middle East, as is the Palestinians' land. I support the two-state solution. We must have two states left to do that. We need to normalise relations which were normalising before this outbreak. We should not lose sight of malign actors such as Iran, Russia and others in whose interest it is to throw petrol on the flames. The two states must ultimately co-exist.

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