Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin (Wicklow-Wexford, Sinn Fein)

Those on board the humanitarian aid flotilla are under clear and present danger as it approaches the coast of Gaza today. Our own Senator Chris Andrews and Barry Heneghan, TD, are on board. We know that Israel has no bottom line - anything goes, basically - and that, previously, it killed nine people on board a humanitarian aid flotilla, so we must act immediately.

Over 20 years ago, I experienced the hospitality of the people of Gaza and the West Bank. It is hard to imagine what may have become of those who warmly welcomed me back then. The unrelenting bombardment, the unimaginable brutality, the psychotic blood lust of a state that is using children's body parts for sniper target practice while they are being deliberately starved - it is like something out of The Hunger Games. I have heard of tanks driving and reversing over heavily pregnant women for sport, doctors being followed home from hospitals by drone systems in order that the Israeli forces can target and blow up their families, and children carrying the emaciated body parts of other dead children on their backs. We have seen stuff that we thought was unimaginable. It is psychotic and it is livestreamed into the palms of our hands. Unfortunately, it has been done with the complicity and the active assistance of the western powers, whether we like to admit it or not. While it has taken a genocide for the Irish Government to start taking meaningful action, we do now have the opportunity to become a leading voice for peace and justice in the world, owing to our own history of genocide, plantation and forced starvation. As Irish people, the attempted eradication of an indigenous people in a colonial land grab, which is basically what this is, is not alien to us.

What can we do today? We need to do all we can immediately to protect the lives of our own citizens, do all we can to get the humanitarian aid into Gaza and enact the occupied territories Bill in full as well as pushing for every form of international sanction that is possible and that we can legally do against this psychotic entity that calls itself Israel. We must act immediately.

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