Irish premier Leo Varadkar has said his government is “profoundly shocked” at the death toll and scale of injuries that have been inflicted by Israeli forces on Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza.
Addressing the parliament on Tuesday Varadkar said his deputy Simon Coveney who is also serving as a foreign minister summoned the Israeli ambassador to Iveagh House (the headquarters of the foreign ministry in Dublin) this morning to express the government’s and the Irish people’s outrage and dismay at these events.
The premier said Coveney directly requested that there is a need for an independent international investigation into what has happened as the UN secretary general has called for.
He said the use of force must be proportionate to the real threat and these protests may not have been 100 percent peaceful but there is no indication that the scale of the threat could have justified such violence and so many deaths.”
He said live ammunition should not be used for crowd control and the government supports the UN security council’s call for an independent investigation.
For his part senior official of the Sinn Fein party Pearse Doherty spoke of the “terrible atrocity” where live ammunition was used against unarmed Palestinians in Gaza.
Doherty said that without adequate diplomatic response more innocent civilians would be killed in the coming days.
He said that Coveney should have told the Israeli ambassador to “pack his bags.”
