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‘Die-in’ protest against Irish Government silence on Gaza

31/7/2014

Thursday, July 31, 2014 from Gaza Action Ireland

Gaza protesters march through Grafton Street

HUNDREDS of protesters, chanting “Boycott Israel”, noisily marched the length of Dublin’s Grafton Street this evening [[THURS]] on their way to a ‘die-in’ at Leinster House to oppose the Irish Government’s inaction over Gaza.

Up to 500 people had earlier heard speeches from doctors and members of the Palestinian community outside the Department of Foreign Affairs on St Stephen’s Green.

The doctors called on the Irish Government to take a firm stand against Israeli attacks on medical workers, hospitals and ambulances in Gaza.

Israel’s increasingly savage assault on Gaza has seen 1,400 people killed in just over three weeks, with many thousands wounded and close to 200,000 displaced. The UN reports that its relief operations are close to breaking point, and Israel has repeatedly targeted schools that were being used as shelter for people with nowhere else to hide.

At Leinster House there were further speeches and hundreds of protesters lay down as if dead, holding sheets of people bearing the names of those killed in Gaza, while part of a list of the victims was read aloud.

Nyssan Deeb, a Palestinian who lives in Dublin, said the daily litany of horrors from Gaza was heartbreaking. “I look at the pictures of children and I see my own child,” she said.

Medics lament Irish abstention on Gaza

24/7/2014

Medics lament Irish abstention on Gaza

DOCTORS, paramedics, nurses and other medical personnel have called for the Irish Government to take a firm stand against Israeli attacks on medical workers, hospitals and ambulances in Gaza.

The protesters, many dressed in scrubs and other clothes of their professions, gathered outside Dáil Eireann with a large crowd of other supporters today [[THURS]] at lunchtime. Some speakers expressed disappointment at Ireland’s abstention in the UN Human Rights Council vote on investigating Israeli war crimes.

During the latest onslaught, thus far one doctor and two paramedics have been killed, more than 30 first-responders wounded and two hospitals bombed. A Red Crescent emergency-services unit and numerous clinics and ambulances have been shelled or damaged.

“In my professional opinion, the ongoing attacks on medics in Gaza clearly constitute a war crime that cannot be justified and warrant immediate referral to the ICC,” Prof Damian McCormack, a surgeon at the Mater hospital, said. “I call on our government to demand an apology from the Israeli ambassador or to expel him.

“Further I call on all medical bodies and colleagues in Ireland to publicly condemn these attacks and not to repeat their shameful silence over attacks on medical personnel in Bahrain in 2011,” McCormack said.

The protest was called by Gaza Action Ireland (GAI) and supported by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Sadaka.

“It’s an absolute shame and disgrace that Ireland abstained yesterday on a mere call for an investigation into possible war crimes,” GAI coordinator Mags O’Brien said.

Irish group condemns Gaza school attack and Irish Government inaction

24/7/2014

From Gaza Action Ireland
Irish group condemns Gaza school attack, Govt inaction

TODAY’S brutal attack on a UN school in Gaza underlines the stupidity and cowardice of Irish and EU policy toward Israel, Gaza Action Ireland (GAI) said.

At least 15 people were killed, with many more injured and the death count likely to grow.

The hospitals in Gaza, already under dire pressure due to the illegal siege, are now in an overwhelming, Israeli-made crisis, running on generators, with zero stock of many vital medicines and a medical community that is under constant military assault trying to deal with mass injuries and fatalities.

“Hospitals, schools, mosques, homes, the entire infrastructure of Gaza is being targeted and the people there are being terrorised and traumatised by the world’s fourth largest military,” Zoe Lawlor, GAI coordinator, said.

Today at the Dáil, GAI organised a protest by doctors, nurses and paramedics against Israel’s targeting of hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical personnel.

“It could hardly be made any clearer than Israel is deliberately targeting civilians,” Lawlor added. “The attack, and their initial lies about this savage massacre, have brought home to the world their basic indifference to Palestinian suffering, something that has been evident throughout the last eight years of violence and siege.”

“The sickening irony is that this atrocity comes so soon after Ireland abstained on the UN Human Rights Council motion to investigate Israeli war crimes,” GAI coordinator Mags O’Brien said. “It is a disgrace that Ireland was dragged into an EU language of ‘balance’ that is just a front for shameful capitulation to Israeli and American intransigence.”

Lawlor said: “This latest attack on a UN school shows Israel’s utter contempt for the international community and of course for the people of Gaza. People who had already been made homeless by 17 days and nights of relentless Israeli bombardment, taking shelter in what they thought was a safe place, were bombed. This is a crime against humanity and Israel must face sanctions for its war crimes against the Palestinian people.

“The thousands of people all over Ireland that have taken part in actions and marches in solidarity with the Palestinian people shows clearly that the Irish Government is blatantly acting against the wishes of the Irish people by its shameful abstention on the UN vote yesterday. The level of outrage at this here is palpable.”

‘Windows into Gaza’ artist’s home is destroyed

16/7/2014

A PAINTER whose work features in the Windows Into Gaza exhibition, currently in the Galway Arts Festival as part of its Irish tour, has seen his home destroyed in an Israeli bombing raid.

The attached photo shows Raed Issa standing beside part of the apartment block that was previously his home, and that of eight other households.

Claudia Saba, an Arabic-speaking member of Gaza Action Ireland who met Raed in Gaza last year, got him on the phone today as he picked through the rubble trying to retrieve his life and work. She relayed the following account:

‘He said he was back in the rubble trying to salvage whatever useful things he could find and that he wanted to do it now because at night “it’s a little more scary”. As I was speaking to him I heard a large explosion. He said that was an airstrike approximately a kilometre away.

‘No one in his family was hurt – they all evacuated beforehand. I asked him if they had received a “warning”. He said they’d received no phone call – but that the Israelis had called their neighbours and told them to evacuate “because the house next to theirs was about to be bombed”. So the neighbours informed Raed’s family and they quickly evacuated too. A few minutes later there was a “knock on the roof” rocket. Meanwhile a relative called them and said he’d been told (through another phone call I think) that Raed’s family should evacuate the women and children but not tell the men and let them die in the blast.

‘Shortly after the “knock on the roof” a major airstrike came and the building was destroyed.’

Issa’s powerful paintings were among those gathered by Irish artist Felim Egan for the Windows Into Gaza exhibition, which received extensive coverage in the national media when it opened in Dublin earlier this year.

Gaza Action Ireland coordinator Zoe Lawlor said: ‘It is horrible to think that there is nothing unusual about Raed’s story. It has been repeated hundreds of times across the tiny strip in recent days, as part of the savage collective punishment of the mostly refugee population in Gaza.

‘Still, because we know Raed and have enjoyed his beautiful work, it brings home the horror and the cynicism of the sadistic Israeli campaign in Gaza. International pressure must force Israel to end it immediately.’

The Windows Into Gaza exhibition is currently showing in the Galway City Museum at Spanish Parade as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until 27th July. It will be in Limerick, the Belltable Arts Centre from 29th September, for four weeks, as part of the Limerick City of Culture.

Galway piece

Israel’s ‘free week’ to target civilians is condemned

15/7/2014

ANY RELIEF for the people of Gaza is welcome, but Israel should never have been allowed to have a ‘free week’ to add to its destruction of lives and property there, says an Irish group with extensive contacts in the Palestinian territory.

Gaza Action Ireland (GAI) said that despite today’s talks of a ceasefire, Israel must answer for deliberately killing civilians and targeting vital water and sewage infrastructure in Gaza — and for the impunity with which it is prepared to resume the savage assault.

One week after the start of the bombing campaign launched by Israel last Tuesday, more than 180 people, including at least 34 children, have been killed in the small coastal strip. Entire families have been obliterated in the massacre.

According to Zoe Lawlor, co-ordinator of GAI, “It’s an absolute outrage that this slaughter has happened, and has been allowed to continue by the western countries that provide vital aid and support to Israel. We’ve seen a repetition of the bloody tradition by which Israel gets at least one week of free bombing before there are any serious efforts by international actors to stop the collective punishment of a refugee population.

“Hundreds of people have been injured, made homeless and severely traumatised by this latest Israeli onslaught, which is completely illegal as well as utterly reprehensible,” Lawlor added. “As human-rights monitors including the respected Palestinian Centre for Human Rights have pointed out, multiple war crimes are being committed against the Palestinian people in Gaza.”

GAI called on the new minister for foreign affairs, Charles Flanagan TD, to take steps to express the Irish people’s anger at the assault, including the removal of the preferential trading status that Israel enjoys with the European Union.

“There were thousands of people out protesting all over Ireland on Saturday, yet our Government’s silence is deafening,” Mags O’Brien of GAI said.

“As on previous occasions in 2008, 2009 and 2012, there is evidence that Israel has deliberately destroyed civilian targets in Gaza, from family homes to sewage plants, and even treating Gaza’s civilian police force as a target ‘combatant’,” O’Brien added. “The notion of Israel encouraging people to evacuate their homes is farcical, when you consider that it has turned Gaza into a prison, where there is no place to hide and no way to escape.”

O’Brien, Lawlor and other members of GAI visited Gaza last year, not long after the destruction from ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’ in November 2012. When they visited it was possible to get through the border crossing with Egypt at Rafah, but the Egyptian closures of both the official crossing and the tunnels that were Gaza’s lifelines have made existence there even more difficult.

“The latest campaign is just an intensification of the constant terror, violence and economic de-development that is created by the illegal siege of Gaza and indeed the broader occupation of Palestine,” Lawlor said. “That’s why it’s so important that we answer the call from Palestinian civil society to support boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and its institutions.”

A statement from the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights this week said: “”What is our demand? It is not extravagant, or unreasonable. We want to be treated as equals. We want our rights respected, and protected. We ask that international law be applied, equally, to Israel and Palestine, to Israelis and Palestinians. The rule of international law must be respected, and all those responsible for its violations must be held to account….. We call too on the international community, on civil society, to add your voices to ours in our quest for rights and justice. Without this, we are all lost.”

This echoes a call from Gaza civil-society groups for: an arms embargo on Israel; sanctions that would cut off the supply of weapons and military aid from Europe and the United States on which Israel depends to commit such war crimes; suspension of all free trade and bilateral agreements with Israel such as the EU-Israel Association agreement; boycott, divestment and sanctions, ascalled for by the overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society in 2005.

Lawlor said GAI endorses and supports these calls from Gaza, and urged the Irish Government to heed them.

Irish group calls for end to Israel’s attacks on Gaza

9/7/2014

ISRAEL’S attacks on Gaza must stop, and international pressure must be put on both the Israeli and Egyptian governments to lift the siege on the Palestinian territory, a group of Irish-based activists said today.

Gaza Action Ireland (GAI), which has close links with human-rights campaigners inside Gaza, said there could be no justification for the bombing that has killed more than 30 people in the territory in the last few days.

Eight children are reported dead, including six killed by a single attack on the home of the Kaware family in the southern-Gaza city of Khan Younis.

“Journalists and others need to understand that when they call these savage bombings an ‘Israeli response’ to Hamas rockets, or suggest some equivalence between the suffering of the two sides, they are playing into the PR strategy of the aggressor, the occupying power, the Israeli state,” Zoe Lawlor, a spokesperson for GAI, said.

Ms Lawlor said the current wave of attacks was started by Israel. “It’s simply another example of Israel carrying out collective punishment of the people of Gaza, contrary to all morality and international law,” she said. “On this occasion, the pretext was the deplorable murder of three young Israelis — but Israel has produced no evidence that Hamas was responsible, and indeed embarked on weeks of arrests, home raids and demolitions throughout the West Bank, again described by Amnesty International as collective punishment.”

GAI’s Mags O’Brien, a trade-union activist with contacts among emergency-service workers in Gaza, said hospitals there were already stretched beyond their capacity. “Gaza suffers from a shortage of medicine and supplies, because of Israeli restrictions and the Egyptian government’s closure of the tunnels that have been such a vital supply line,” Ms O’Brien said. “They’re struggling to cope with the casualties of this latest assault.”

Ms Lawlor, Ms O’Brien and other GAI members visited Gaza last year, not long after Israel’s ‘Operation Pillar of Cloud’ killed more than 150 people.

Ms Lawlor said: “We need Irish politicians, and others, to stand with the people of Palestine. This latest attack is just an escalation of the state of terror that is Israel’s standard operating procedure against the besieged people of Gaza. We also need civil society to support the Palestinian call for BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) on Israel.”

Solidarity with Palestine events this weekend Dublin Limerick Cork