When the order to evacuate came from the Israel Defense Forces, Wael Abu Dalfa realised that his mother – nearly 80, frail with hunger and barely able to walk – would not be able to flee their Gaza City home on foot. Leaving her with his wife and their two adult sons, he went out into the chaotic streets searching for a taxi or any vehicle that could bring her to safety. When he returned, his home was gone. All that remained after the air strike was a pile of smoking rubble. Buried beneath it was his family. Some of them were, possibly, still alive but beyond rescue with Israel blocking access by civil defence teams; left to die slowly.
That was three days ago, less than 24 hours after the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had reported that northern Gaza, where the eponymous city is located, is “effectively inaccessible” after 50 days under siege. “Our requests for access have been repeatedly and systematically denied by Israeli forces with devastating consequences,” said Muhanad Hadi, the humanitarian co-ordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory. “Families are trapped under rubble, the sick and wounded cannot reach hospitals, and basic supplies – water, food, medical care – have run out.”
On Wednesday, the day after Wael’s family was obliterated, Reuters reported that “eight people had been killed in air strikes in Beit Lahiya while four others were killed elsewhere in Gaza City”. Those four people had a connection with Ireland.
Sherin Alsabbagh was at work in Co Roscommon when she got the news about her cousin Wael and his mother, her aunt Suad, whose name means “happiness”. Suad was the second of her mother’s five sisters to be killed in the Israeli onslaught. The first sister was struck dead by a tank shell in October on her way to get medicine at a clinic. “My mother, on the phone, said: ‘I’m losing them one by one’,” Sherin recounts. An Irish citizen, she says she is “going mad” with fear that her mother, Najwa, will be next.
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Sherin’s mother lives near Al-Shifa hospital, which has been repeatedly attacked by the Israeli military. Najwa (74) is in poor health and has become gaunt with hunger due to the severe food shortages caused by Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid for the past two months in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Her medical condition spurred Sherin to apply for an Irish visa for her mother in October 2023 so that she could come and live with her in Ballaghaderreen. The Department of Foreign Affairs issued the visa in early February, but it was May before the Israeli authorities granted approval for Najwa to leave Gaza, by which time the border crossings were shut. She remains trapped there, becoming weaker and fatalistic. She has told her daughter she prays that she will be buried after she is killed and not left lying in the street to be eaten by scavenging dogs.
The two big parties would rather deal with Independents bearing parochial shopping lists for new roads and town bypasses than having to wrangle over international life-and-death concerns
“I voted for my first time in the election on Friday,” Sherin told me. “I was happy exercising democracy and looking to the future but I feel like I am living two lives. Back home in Gaza, everything is being demolished bit by bit. I’m so proud to be an Irish citizen and I don’t like begging. Ireland has been so good to me, but this is breaking my heart.”
In all the pre-coalition posturing with parties and Independent TDs listing their demands to support the next government, Israel’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians has not been mentioned. Not even a word about the long-awaited Occupied Territories Bill, which elicited a chorus of righteous impatience from the Opposition before the election was called. Not even mentioned by Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael who, surely, must recognise that some of voters’ goodwill was in response to their government’s recognition of the state of Palestine.
The two big parties would rather deal with Independents bearing parochial shopping lists for new roads and town bypasses than having to wrangle over international life-and-death concerns. In all the Mercs-and-perks talk about who will be the taoiseach and who will get which Cabinet portfolios, there has been scant appetite to utilise the foreign affairs ministry to face down the warmongers in Jerusalem and Washington. Will any Independent supplicant prioritise the rescue of Najwa, an Irish visa-holder and the mother of an Irish citizen, as a condition for joining the government?
The world has legal and human obligations to intercede for the people of Gaza – now more than ever as the superpower state of America fans the flames of Israel’s Dantesque inferno and its nine circles of hell. With the United States repeatedly defeating UN motions for a ceasefire while, at the same time, supplying Israel with arms to continue the genocide, the world desperately needs statesmen and stateswomen to call a halt. Diplomatic gestures are good and welcome but futile in the face of Joe Biden decrying as “outrageous” the International Criminal Court’s issuance of an arrest warrant for Binyamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump threatening to unleash “hell” in the Middle East if the Israeli hostages are not released by the time he is sworn in as president in January.
By Tuesday this week, at least 44,502 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since October 2023 and 105,454 more have been wounded. Among the dead were at least 343 humanitarian workers. In the past eight months, just 353 hospital patients have been successfully evacuated from the region long known as “an open prison”. Now it is firmly locked and bolted. For Israel’s land, sea and air forces, it is the human equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
Among the many barbaric crimes Israel is committing in Gaza, one seldom mentioned is its contravention of article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that everyone has the right to leave a country, including their own. The first item in Ireland’s new programme for government ought to be the insistence that this right is universally honoured, so that Najwa Alsabbagh and her compatriots can escape. To coin a phrase – bring her home to her daughter in Ballaghaderreen.