Natasha Newsome Drennan (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein)

The United Nations has reported that up to 14,000 children in Gaza are at risk of starving to death in the next 48 hours. That is the same number of children under the age of 18 living in Carlow. It is unimaginable to picture that amount of death for such innocent children - 14,000 childhoods erased in 48 hours. The genocide in Gaza is reaching levels of unimaginable horror. Yesterday, the EU Foreign Affairs Council met and agreed to take the softest action possible in reviewing the EU-Israel trade agreement and see whether Israel is in breach of Article 2 of the agreement, on respect for human rights and democratic principles. In the next two days, 14,000 children are expected to starve to death and the best the EU can muster up is a review into whether Israel is breaching respect for human rights.

Israel's crimes against humanity, its deliberate attacks on hospitals, civilians and medical personnel, could not be documented any more clearly but the EU is still unsure as to whether Israel is breaching a respect for human rights. We need to be frank with our EU counterparts. The EU is complicit in this genocide and in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Arms and public funds continue to flow from Europe into Israel. We need sanctions on Israel and an arms embargo. We need to stop the flow of arms through Shannon and Irish airspace to Israel. We need an immediate cancellation of the EU trade deal.

Israel is a rogue, terrorist state and needs to be treated as one. While ours is only one state within the EU 27, there is so much more we can do at home. We can enact the occupied territories Bill and the Illegal Israeli Settlements Divestment Bill. All the main parties gave their support to the occupied territories Bill in the run-up to the general election but, of course, it has fallen into the category of the broken election promises of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We need to end the sale of Israeli bonds by the Irish Central Bank. It is the inaction of the EU and our part of the international community that has emboldened Israel to take its genocide to new levels because it sees and feels that it is untouchable, thanks to its supporters within the EU.

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