Rebecca Moynihan (Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is against the backdrop of an unfolding humanitarian horror in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories that we are here today. Ireland was among the first to clearly come out to say that Israel could not act and respond outside of the remit of international law, when the initial response from the EU was to cut off aid to Palestine and the misjudged and outrageous visit of Ursula von der Leyen, giving licence to Israel to effectively respond however it wanted to.

The motions presented by the Government in this House and in the Dáil yesterday, while not containing everything we wanted, were significantly more balanced than what we saw presented last week. I was glad to see last night Dáil Éireann speaking with a semi-coherent voice. That will allow our Government, speaking on behalf of us all, to take a human rights-based ethical position within the EU 27, which is where our voice needs to be strongest because now is the time to bring Israel back from the brink and not allow the Netanyahu government to indulge its worst instincts.

The 7 October attack was designed to provoke and a right-wing intransigent government reacted as was expected. Years of othering and of dehumanising the Palestinian people allowed it, without shame or seemingly consequences, to indicate it was prepared to flatten Gaza, an area with 1 million people, half of whom are children. We need to be clear that there can be no collective punishments of the citizens of Palestine for the actions of Hamas. There can be no space for the deliberate breaking of international law, for carpet bombing, the targeting of civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, or the starving of people of food, water and electricity, which is basic infrastructure we need to survive.

Among the information overload, the armchair munitions experts and the disinformation of the fog of war, one thing is very clear from the images we see coming from Gaza. Civilians are being targeted. Innocent children are terrified and these are powerful images we are seeing. It is a scar on our humanity. There will always be spin among combatants but we have called for the ICC to investigate the hospital bombing. It is important that the Government pushes that at an EU level now.

The international community has reached a crossroads in its dealings with Israel. Israel can no longer act without consequences, which we would not tolerate from any other state actor. We have been here before, trying to temper the worst instincts of despotic leaders while watching them commiting war crimes before our very eyes. We watched and allowed this to happen in the Balkans in the early 1990s and we cannot allow it to happen now.

This year we celebrated 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement which has saved thousands of lives. That process was not easy and it still is not easy but running parallel to our peace process at the time was a very similar peace process in the Middle East. Some 25 years later our peace is not perfect but it is significantly advanced. In the Middle East, however, the peace seems even more distant and the events of the past couple of weeks could lead to a contagion among the countries of the Middle East, when we are already watching horrors which still emerge daily from Syria.

I put that down in large part to the intransigence of the Israeli Government which created Hamas and the shift to the right we have seen happening in Israel over the past 20 years. We need the Government to be operating with one voice in the EU 27 because that is where our power is and that is what can stop and pull Israel back from the brink of what it has been threatening over the past number of weeks.