As I will not be here on Thursday, I want to talk about what is happening in Gaza today. I will start with two quotes. I think we all received the first last Thursday from the mission of the state of Palestine, which wrote to us:

We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law. We renounce violence and adhere to international legitimacy, peaceful popular resistance, and political action as a path to achieving our national goals.

That is a perfectly reasonable and sensible statement and I endorse every word that the mission of the state of Palestine said in relation to what has happened in the past week.

The second quote is from an editorial in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, and is particularly interesting:

The disaster that befell Israel... is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession... while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.

I read that into the record to show there is a breadth of opinion within Israel and a significant portion of it does not support the horrendous actions we are witnessing in Gaza.

The numbers change all the time. It looked like 2,800 deaths this morning; at least 800 children, perhaps more; plus 1,000 missing from Gaza. Eight hundred children have been killed in the past week and President Biden is choosing tomorrow to go over and show his steadfast support for Israel, after seeing 800 children murdered by carpet bombing in Gaza. That is what is happening. We are seeing ethnic cleansing and mass murder in relation to one nation, Palestine. It is appalling. To be clear, I condemn all violence in relation to this over the past week.

I know European leaders are meeting this afternoon and the Taoiseach is involved. Surely the call all of us must endorse is for an immediate ceasefire on all sides and the release of hostages. If we do not, we are somehow implying it is okay for Israel to continue carpet bombing and perhaps to invade Gaza as it plans to do. By the time the House debates this on Thursday, how many more hundreds of children will have died? There is hard work going on to agree a motion and I hope we can agree one across the parties. Surely we can all agree the call from Europe must be for an immediate ceasefire on all sides and the release of hostages. If Europe cannot agree to that, then I urge a coalition of the willing.

The Irish Government should be part of that demand for peace and an immediate ceasefire.

I too want to raise the situation in Gaza. A lot of words have been used in the past ten days and, of course, the World Health Organization came out today to describe the situation as a human catastrophe. We need to reflect on what those words really mean - a deprivation of the most basic means to subsist, a lack of water, a lack of electricity and hospitals facing the prospect of closing over the next 24 hours. It is outrageous that we are seeing the Israeli Government perpetuate a collective punishment on all of the people in Gaza.

Of course, people are hurting on all sides. The provocative barbarity of Hamas has to be condemned, and I think most of us condemn it. However, the actions of the Israeli Government cannot continue. Senator Gavan is right that time is of the essence, and I support the efforts to try to come up with a motion for Thursday's debate in the House. There has to be a cessation of violence now and there has to be peace. I know people have different views on what that peace needs to look like, but we are witnessing the annihilation of a people in Gaza at this point in time by an Israeli Government. That has to be called out and it has to stop.

The other issue that I want to raise concerns the section 39 organisations. We thought this morning that we were facing into yet another strike and, thankfully, we are not. It is to the enormous credit of SIPTU, Fórsa and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation that they brokered a deal very late last night but it is outrageous that the Government forced these workers into such a situation. In talking to some of the organisations over recent days, they have reported a fivefold increase in union membership over the past two years of this campaign to try to get pay parity and pay fairness within section 39 organisations. There is something in that, which is that when workers come together, they can achieve something.

I call for a debate with the Minister for Health. We have had a shocking set of public pronouncements in recent days, most notably on Sunday by the chief executive of the HSE, who said the budget agreed for the HSE next year is a fiction and that they have budgeted for a deficit. We need to hear from the Minister, Deputy Donnelly, who is charged with negotiating the budget for our health services next year. We all know the impact on our services of the shortages at the moment but, given the shortages that are going to arise when we do not even have money in the health service to stand still next year, let alone meet the massive recruitment need, we need to hear from the Minister what he proposes to do about that.