Ciarán Ahern (Dublin South West, Labour)

Last month, my wife and I welcomed a new baby into our lives. It has been just so joyous, spending the first few weeks of a child's life together as a family, getting to know our new baby and seeing them grow and develop a little personality. It was a precious time. I returned to work here after a few weeks of parental leave. Last week I attended a briefing by the Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine, which outlined in absolutely heart wrenching detail the extent of the war on children and healthcare workers that Israel is conducting. It has been a very strange juxtaposition - a disturbing and devastating one. Looking at my new son, this beautiful and fragile new life, I then see images of babies just like him in Gaza starving, malnourished, mutilated and, in too many cases, dead. I look at my son and cannot even begin to imagine the pain the parents of those Palestinian babies must feel and their anguish and constant despair. Quite frankly, I would not want to imagine it. It is not a pain that any parent or any human being should have to feel.

As legislators, we need to see what is happening in Gaza but the horrors are so obscene and frequent that it is difficult not to scroll past them when they come up on one's social media feed. We have to keep watching. We have to continue to let it devastate us from afar. We have to continue to let it drive us to do more and to conclusively and sustainably end the genocide. No parent should have to live in constant fear a bomb will suddenly drop on their new baby's head. No parent should have to watch his or her child be starved to death.

Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war and of its genocide on the people of Gaza. The blocking of aid into Gaza and the rhetoric we have been hearing over the past number of weeks from Netanyahu and his government have made their intentions clear if they were not already obvious. They have dropped any pretence that their war on Gaza and on the Palestinian people is one of defence and that it is about Israel's security. It has always been about eliminating the Palestinian people and colonising their land. Now the Israeli Government is saying the quiet part out loud. It is talking about a full occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and about ethnic cleansing. It has killed upwards of 55,000 people, including more than 15,000 children. That is a full classroom of children every day. It is genocide. Virtually all scholars on the issue are now in agreement.

There can be no more excuses for delaying the passage of the occupied territories Bill - goods and services included. Last week, I co-signed a letter along with hundreds of other Irish lawyers, confirming there is no legal impediment to that. I hope those experts are invited to appear before the foreign affairs committee so that the Tánaiste's stated issues with the legality of the services aspect of that Bill are set aside and that he and the Government can get fully behind it. We can have no more excuses for continuing to allow weapons to be transported to Israel through our airspace or for the sale of Israeli war bonds by the Central Bank. We need to see the Government use every lever at its disposal to pressure the international community to act. This motion provides for one of those levers.

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