Micheál Martin hears ‘begging’ pleas for support of Israel
Micheál Martin visits Israel's Be’eri kibbutz where Emily Hand was last seen. Picture: Miri Shimonovich/DFA
“They come to support?” mayor of Sderot, Alon Davidi turned and asked the Israeli foreign minister.
After a few hushed words in Hebrew from the minister Eli Cohen, the mayor began to speak to Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who sat directly across the oval table around which 22 people had managed to squeeze themselves.
“My children do not understand and do not know how to behave like normal children,” he said.
Detailing a life where air-raid sirens, bomb shelters, and fear are part of regular daily life, the mayor, who lost 45 people on October 7 and whose citizens have since fled to hotels, said: “I don’t know if you understand what the meaning of post-trauma is? Do your children suffer from that?”
The air in the small room was already thick, but it became stifling as Martin, a man who has buried two of his own children, sat stony-faced and silent.
Even before the brutal and barbaric October 7 Hamas attacks there were decades of unhealed wounds and simmering tensions that have, in some cases, now boiled over into blinding hatred.
Martin explained that he was there to listen and seek to understand the trauma that Davidi and his community have gone through.
Before being chaperoned into the town hall, the Tánaiste had been shown around the evacuated town.
Birdsong was the only noise in a street where a police station had been captured by Hamas fighters, until artillery flying across the sky into Gaza added a low drone.
An hour later, as Martin’s convoy raced its way further south, a plume of heavy purple smoke reached high in the sky across the border, the result of around 400 missiles that would be dropped on the enclave that day.
But first, back in the windowless conference room in the town hall, the mayor continued:
“I am begging you and I ask you, support Israel.
“This is the chance not for us, for the people of Gaza. If Israel can finish the job and destroy Hamas, then after I think that we can change the future. Without that nothing will change.”
In his low but authoritative voice, Martin said Ireland is “unequivocal” in its condemnation of Hamas and the terrorist atrocities it has carried out against women, children, and other innocent civilians.
He warned that there is now a real danger that the current actions of Israel will radicalise future generations even further.
“We worry about children, innocent children in Gaza, who are not part of Hamas but are getting killed right now,” Martin said, calling for a humanitarian ceasefire and political solution.
In response, the mayor added: “I will say to my prime minister to stop the war, if Ireland can promise me that after five days, all the weapons that Hamas has in Gaza and all the army of Hamas goes outside to Egypt or someplace, maybe to Ireland, maybe to Europe. But we know you cannot do that.” With that, the media who had managed to eke out the last piece of space around the walls of the conference room were asked to leave. The 22 Israeli and Irish officials remained.
At the Be’eeri Kibbutz where Emily Hand was last seen, Martin picked his way over broken tiles as glass and debris of destroyed homes crunched and broke underfoot.
A child’s comb lay in the charred front garden of what would have been a well- manicured garden before death and destruction visited the community in early October.
As Martin listened to a number of survivors who gave first-person accounts of hiding in safe rooms for hours as bullets rang out, the thunderous reverberations of airstrikes could be heard raining down on Gaza, only 4km away.
