Irish Examiner view: Ireland must play its part in stopping violence in Middle East

Israeli firefighters at the site where a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit the central Israeli town of Holon, near Tel Aviv. Picture: AP Photo/Heidi Levine

As a small nation, we do not have a lot of power, but we do exercise a great deal of influence on a global scale — signs being that we won a seat on the United Nations Security Council last June, against strong opposition from other countries. We should now use that seat to try to halt the escalating violence in the Middle East — the worst since the 2014 war.

Gaza’s Hamas rulers and other militant groups have fired hundreds of rockets that have at times overwhelmed Israel’s missile defences. In response, the Israelis have levelled two apartment blocks in the Gaza Strip, where 2m Palestinians have lived under a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade since Hamas took power in 2007. The destruction of apartment blocks in Gaza was among several tactics used during the 2014 war that are now the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes.