Letters to the Editor: Death trap food aid centres in Gaza

Exhausted Palestinians who walk off the correct route to the GHF aid centres or linger too long in despair after aid runs out are shot at and killed daily. Picture: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu/Getty

The Israel-US Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was first registered in February this year and its fewer food aid centres set up on May 26 in Gaza are described as death traps overseen by Israel’s military and armed contractors.

Last week, Jens Laerke, the UN spokesperson for the coordination of humanitarian affairs, said the GHF “is not delivering supplies safely to those in need” and it was a “failure” from a humanitarian point of view.

Exhausted Palestinians who walk off the correct route to the GHF aid centres or linger too long in despair after aid runs out are shot at and killed daily. Tanks are also used to fire at civilians. These are supposed to be warning shots.

The banning of international media by Israel from Gaza since the war began in October 2023 is a key factor as to why the war in Gaza is so extreme as it is now in the summer of 2025.

If, for example, Britain’s Channel 4 or the US’ CBS News was in Gaza reporting on the war, violence, deaths, and brutal injuries of civilians with their videos of hospitals hit by Israel’s missile attacks with some of the dead and wounded medics, nurses, doctors, patients, children or babies; it would have had a faster impact on governments calling on Israel to end the targeting of civilians in the most miserable war of the 21st century.

Experienced aid agencies run by the UN, Britain, etc, have been more restricted in Gaza since March. There are requests for the UN to be let fully back in to deliver aid safely.

Israel has a right as any country to ensure its security — but daily, casual killings by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) of civilians in Gaza is truly reprehensible.

All moral lines are violated in this war. No protection for the civilian population. I hope Hamas will release the remaining hostages it took into Gaza in October 2023. They too endure terrible conditions.

Mary Sullivan, College Rd, Cork

Help sought in seeking relatives from Cork City

I’m trying to find out who my mum’s relative was who came over from Ireland or America. I think it would have been a cousin.

Her name was Eileen — although I’m not sure of her surname — she could have been Eileen Geaney, Eileen Quinn, Eileen Foley, or Eileen Fenton. These would have been her maiden surnames.

My mother’s maiden name was Catherine Fenton, born in 1927. Her mother’s maiden name was Catherine Quinn, born in Cork in 1900. Her last address in the city was 56 Blarney St in 1920. Her father was Richard Quinn, whose last known address was 11 Winter’s Hill before he died in 1917.

My mother’s father was John Christopher Fenton, born in 1897 in Broad Lane, Cork.

His father was Michael Fenton, and his mother was Margaret.

Does anyone have a relative that was called Eileen and was possibly born around 1927 give or take a few years and used to visit my grandmother at 78, Butt Park Rd, Honicknowle, Plymouth, England? Last known visit was the summer of 1971.

I appreciate any information regarding Eileen’s relationship to the above mentioned, which can be sent to: [e-mail].

Cathy Mitchell, Torpoint, Cornwall

Government clearly in a dilemma over Israel

Following several debates in the Dáil over the past weeks, the Government clearly has a dilemma on its hands. Quoting legal obstacles, they voted twice against the introduction of restrictions on the Central Bank of Ireland regarding their facilitation of the sale of Israeli war bonds on the EU market, while at the same time unequivocally describing the slaughter and starvation carried out by Israel in Gaza as war crimes and a genocide.

While legal constraints must be considered, the ongoing genocide in Gaza demands that the Government exploits all possible means to align the institutional framework with their admirably strong moral stance.

If this prompts a legal challenge at EU level, so be it.

The situation is perhaps well summarised in the words of the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau in 1849: “If it [the law] is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine [in this instance the mechanisms of national or EU government]. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

Tom Butterly, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin

Time for general boycott and sanctions on Israel

Given the deranged continuing assault and starvation of the civilian population of Gaza by the Netanyahu regime, is the Occupied Territories Bill still fit for purpose?

Is it not now necessary to have a complete general boycott and sanctions imposed on Israel, rather than just on the occupied territories, as long as this regime remains in power and continues extreme policies that will render the hopes for a two-state solution impossible to deliver.

Andrew Feinstein, a Jewish former prominent figure in the ANC [African National Congress], has said before that Israeli apartheid of Palestinians is “far more brutal than anything we saw or experienced in South Africa”.

The world was ready to impose strict sanctions on apartheid South Africa, so why not now on the rampaging vengeance of Netanyahu in Gaza, the accelerated internationally illegal annexation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, as well as all the humiliating day-to-day repressions of the apartheid system?

Netanyahu has also made a terrible situation worse by his attacks on Iran thus further confusing the moral ambivalence of the European and G7 powers.

Instead of the Western democracies, with some notable exceptions, inexplicably enabling the genocidal impunity of Netanyahu, they should be doing everything in their power to contain and stop him.

Shame on them.

Cynthia Carroll, Newport, Co Tipperary

Mitigating the impact of Cork-Limerick motorway

The Cork to Limerick motorway is a vital piece of infrastructure. However, the environmental impact of the project should be a major concern.

Whichever contractor is appointed, it should be fine if the road surface was built to German autobahn standard — without a repeat of instances of surface break-up and drainage problems seen on previous motorways.

I hope that vast numbers of trees and shrubs will be planted to screen it from surrounding areas (a good mix of evergreen as well, because deciduous trees look rather bleak for five months of the year).

As well as provisions for farmers, I hope that under and overpasses are provided so that wildlife can move easily across the motorway route.

In addition, competitions should be held for sculptors to design artistic installations for sites on the route

Martin Ray, Deansgrange, Dublin

No change of use required for funeral home

In relation to your online article — ‘Undertakers lodge plans to convert vacant former bank in Cork into funeral home’ (Irish Examiner, June 17) — it perplexes me that the developer should require change of use planning permission for a facility that has dealt with debt since the early 1980s.

John Deasy, Ballincollig, Cork

Planning to be a landlord was not ‘accidental’

Thank you for publishing the article by Kevin O’Donoghue on his experience as a landlord. It is an insightful one.

One that we must learn from as a country so our “muscle memory”, as he describes it, is attuned to these hazards in the future.

He’s very honest about his purchase of four houses in rural North Cork in 2003.

“Our plan was simple,” he wrote.

“We would use the Germans’ money to buy, hold for five years, and having had the benefits of an uplift, sell the properties, pay off the mortgages and retain the profit to be rolled over in the next adventure.”

He implies that he is an “accidental landlord”.

I’ve encountered many accidental landlords from the mid-noughties.

They are people who purchased a property, often to live in themselves.

They may later have had to move for work or family and, being caught by negative equity after the bust, ended up renting the property as a home to someone else.

Mr O’Donoghue is not one of these.

By his own description, his plan in 2003 was to purchase the properties for rent and flip these at a profit.

Housing, he wrote, “is a State responsibility”.

Now, after issuing notices to quit for reason of sale to four households, he acknowledges those living there “will find it next to impossible to locate alternative accommodation”.

He says he “never signed up to be that f**ing b**ard”.

Let that permeate our muscle memory.

Oliver Doyle, Montenotte, Cork

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