Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

Any plan that could end the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is to be welcomed. The world has watched a genocide as children starve and aid rots just miles away. I welcome that a core part of the 20-point plan is to end the weaponisation of aid from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and place it in the hands of the UN and the Red Crescent.

However, for any peace deal to work, it must be constructed and agreed by all parties to the conflict. A unilateral deal is not the platform for a stable or lasting peace.

The Good Friday Agreement worked because it was a constructive process that all parties built and signed up to. At its centre was parity of esteem, new political institutions, demilitarisation and consent. It was voted on and there was a peaceful pathway forward for those who desired independence. It was not forced upon a battered population with the promise of only more death and destruction should they refuse.

Great strides have been made in recent months towards full and proper recognition of Palestinian statehood. To remove Palestinians now entirely from the peace process is a regressive step that returns Palestine to an occupied territory stripped of sovereignty and self-determination. The war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, has already said he will not remove troops from Gaza - that there will be no demilitarisation. He absolutely does not agree to Palestinian statehood. Statehood and self-determination is recognised in the plan as an "aspiration of the Palestinian people", but any movement is conditional on the redevelopment of Gaza and the reform of the Palestinian Authority. There is no agreement on borders. Any hope of a pre-1967 border seems to have been erased from this plan, nor is there any mention of the West Bank and East Jerusalem where settler homes are springing up by the thousands. There is no plan to address the apartheid system that leaves Palestinians second-class citizens in their own land.

My fear is that any plan that fails to address the core conflict that has existed since 1948 will only be another false dawn. If there are to be guarantors of peace, it must be an international coalition, certainly not those who supplied weapons and gave the political and military cover, which enables the occupation and the ongoing genocide that continues to kill innocent men, women, and children in Gaza and across Palestine.

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