Israel-Gaza: Sammy Wilson says 'Irish government in the past have acted like Hamas - no wonder they are anti-Israeli now'

Soon after the Hamas attack on Israel, she had visited the country and told its leaders: “In the face of this unspeakable tragedy there’s only one possible response: Europe stands with Israel. And Israel has the right to defend itself, in fact it has the duty to defend its people.”

Subsequently, Irish president Michael D Higgins told reporters: “It may not have been meant to have malevolent consequences, but certainly we need a better performance in relation to European Union diplomacy and practice.

“I think that coming down on one side of these arguments is not a positive contribution… [it was] a thoughtless and even reckless set of actions.”

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar also weighed in, saying her remarks “lacked balance”.

He said Israel had the right to defend itself but that its response “must be exercised within the parameters of international humanitarian law”, adding: “Even wars have rules.

"Collective punishment should not be inflicted on the population and Gaza. Citizens must be protected, and Gaza must have access to humanitarian aid.”

In the course of his remarks, Mr Higgins had also said there had been “unanimous revulsion” at the attack by Hamas, and that he shared “the horror of all those who have been hearing and viewing the details”.

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Responding to the Irish leaders, Mr Wilson told the News Letter: “It's quite clear they don't take a balanced view. They're quite clearly anti-Israeli.

"No sooner were the words of condemnation out of their mouths about the horrific terrorist actions of Hamas than they were starting to blame Israel before Israel had even started to retaliate against Hamas terrorists.

"The fact of the matter is of course that we know what the Irish government's stance over the years has been to terrorism.

"It wasn't all that many years ago the Irish government were allowing Irish terrorists to hide across their border and commit atrocities against the Protestant population in Northern Ireland, refusing to extradite them, allowing them to have their training camps, allowing them to launch their attacks on people along the border.

"Really, the Irish government didn't do much different than Hamas are doing in Palestine, and you can see why they'd have some sympathy with them.

"They were first out of the blocks to say aid should not be stopped to Gaza, even though there is well-documented evidence that that aid was being used by Hamas to pay their own terrorists, pay families of terrorists who were in jail in Israel and promote educational propaganda for schools in the Gaza strip.

"Their historical record has been one of defending terrorists, and their current record is one of opposing the only democracy in the Middle East and supporting and being sympathetic towards terrorists who are trying to destroy that democracy.”

Speaking of an upcoming protest at the BBC in Belfast by Palestine supporters over its coverage of the conflict, Mr Wilson said: “I think what those pro-Palestinian people are doing, it's not that they believe the BBC has been biased against them.

"It's simply that they're trying to ensure they continue to be biased in favour of them.

"One only has to look at the way in which, even after the most horrendous atrocities were carried out, the BBC were still refusing to call Hamas 'terrorists'.”

According to the UN Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of Tuesday, the Ministry of Health in Gaza was reporting 3,000 Palestinians killed, and Israeli sources were reporting 1,300 Israeli fatalities – though precise confirmations of numbers are proving impossible to obtain.

The long-term aspiration of most mainstream western politicians, and of many Israelis and Arabs, has been a two-state solution: a sovereign Israeli state roughly within the country's 1967 borders, and a sovereign Palestinian state next to it.

In this vein, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (basically the old government of Palestine) agreed to recognise Israel in 1993.

Almost the whole world – with the exception of a number of Arab states, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Cuba – officially recognises Israel today.

Palestine meanwhile is recognised by 135 of the other 194 states in the world (including by Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and India) but not by the western powers: the USA, UK, France, Germany, Canada, or Australia.

Ireland also does not recognise Palestine.

In 2014, the House of Commons voted by 274 to 12 to recognise Palestine as a state (with five DUP MPs being among the 12 who voted against), but this vote was not binding on the government.

Hamas has effectively ruled the Gaza Strip since it won an election there in 2006 – the last election held in the Palestinian territories.

Israel has tightly controlled entry of goods and people into the Gaza Strip ever since for fear of empowering Hamas, and repeated outbursts of cross-border violence have killed several thousand people (overwhelmingly Palestinians).

The Palestinian territories are poor in comparison to Israel, standing at 106 in the UN's Human Development Index league table compared with Israel at 22.

However Palestine lies only slightly behind its Arab neighbours Egypt (97) and Jordan (102), and is above next door nation Lebanon (112).

As well as bombings in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attack, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza enclave, adding (according to Haaretz’ English translation): "No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly."

Hamas was formed in the late 1980s, and its charter set out an extreme Islamist interpretation of Jewish-Muslim relations.

It stated a desire not just to re-conquer Israel itself by exclusively armed means (“so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement”) but also casts itself as “the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism... [and] the fight with the warmongering Jews”.