Diane Dodds questions Sinn Fein outrage over a Gazan hospital being in the firing line given the IRA attacked hospitals on its own doorstep

The explosion at the Anglican Church-run Al Ahli hospital, killing unknown hundreds of patients, refugees, medics, and visitors, has led to a global tsunami of disgust amid competing claims about who is responsible.

Mrs Dodds pointed out that the IRA has also violated the supposedly off-limits nature of hospitals in Northern Ireland, such as when it tried to assassinate her husband Nigel in 1996 (among other occasions).

A number of pro-Palestine supporters have blamed the Al Ahli blast on Israel, which has been blockading and bombing the densely-populated strip ever since Hamas killers swarmed into Israel from there on October 7.

Israel and its number one ally, the USA, have said that in fact the blast appears to have originated from a misfired rocket in Gaza itself, possibly belonging to the group Islamic Jihad, a smaller cousin of Hamas.

Martina Anderson, herself a former IRA bomber, wrote: “Over 500 Palestinians murdered in an Israeli attack in Anglican Church hospital (Al Ahli Arab) in Gaza. Natanyahu [sic] should be in front of the International Criminal Court ICC for war crimes. #Gaza_Genocide.”

Four days before Christmas 1996, the IRA sent a team to kill Mr Dodds, then a Belfast City councillor who had recently served as lord mayor of the city, whilst he and his wife were visiting their sick son (then aged about six years old) in the children’s wing of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast.

“Andrew had been very ill and was intensive care,” said Mrs Dodds. “There’s a small tiny room just outside intensive care, and we were sitting there, waiting, when a nurse came, screaming out to get down.

“The police pulled us down, then we heard the shots. It was all very quick, very stark, very frenetic – and the shouting!

“We were alright, we were fortunate: there was a policeman who was with us who had been shot.”

She said the two policemen on duty there that night were “heroes,” adding: “But for their quick actions in recognising these individuals, goodness knows what carnage would have been done.

"When it all settled down we realised bullets had gone through children’s incubators.

“It is shocking that people who can’t condemn that for their neighbours are condemning it the Middle East.

"Michelle O’Neill said there was ‘no alternative’ to IRA violence, and that – I presume – means there was no alternative to shooting through incubators in an intensive care unit in the children’s hospital, bombing in Musgrave, or shooting an RUC man as he left [Mid-Ulster hospital].”

The other incidents she mentioned was the killing of 25-year-old reserve constable John Proctor, who had just visited his wife and new-born son when he was shot dead in the car park of the Mid-Ulster Hospital in Magherafelt in 1981. The bombing at Musgrave Park hospital in south Belfast in 1991 killed two soldiers and injured 11 people.