humanitarian, palestine

Palestine crisis: A message from a bleeding Gaza

May 21, 2021

As Israel continues its relentless attacks on Palestinian communities, ActionAid Palestine’s senior humanitarian programme officer, Samah Kassab, shares a powerful and heartbreaking message from Gaza.

Greetings from a bleeding Gaza. We appreciate the solidarity of people around the world and their messages to stop the aggression and the injustice which Israel is levelling against Palestinian communities. Violence which violates international humanitarian and human rights laws.

But despite the solidarity of people around the world, governments have not yet influenced Israel to stop the airstrikes on Gaza.

Our women and children are being targeted, just because we want to stay in our homeland. How could innocent children and women threaten the security of Israel?

The death toll from the attacks is rising. But we are not numbers, and every person who was killed has a story to be shared, every one of these martyrs had a dream they hoped would come true.

Every mother who has lost a child wished that she could have kept them in her womb and did not bring them out into this world to be targeted by missiles.

Every child who lost their mother in this aggression, will no longer get the hug that makes them feel safe.

Every day and every night I stand helpless in front of my children. I cannot stop their bodies from trembling due to the terror caused by the continuous bombing.

I think all the time, how I would live if I lost my children and how they would live if I died?

But despite all of this and because we have the right to, we have a hope of freedom, we will rise again.

According to UN figures, the crisis has displaced more than 75,000 Palestinians, around 40 per cent of them children, and destroyed thousands of homes, government offices, schools and the only health centre providing Covid-19 testing and vaccines in Gaza.

ActionAid’s humanitarian response in Gaza will focus on the most vulnerable groups, including families whose homes have been completely or partially destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.

Working with local partner organisations, ActionAid is looking to reach close to 2,000 families in urgent need of support, including food, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), essential items, such as hygiene kits, clothes, blankets, mattresses and nappies, psychosocial support for traumatised children and their families, and women’s protection services.

Donate to our response to the Gaza crisis: https://www.actionaid.org.uk/gaza-crisis-2021
Originally published by ActionAid International
Pictured: Samah Kassab pictured among the devastation caused by Israeli airstrikes. Photo credit: ActionAid Palestine

Protestors at COP 28 in Dubai. Photo: Konrad Skotnicki.

Belfast Climate Change March, 2019. Photo: Trócaire.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

Despite their overwhelming contribution to global emissions, fossil fuel companies continue to attract significant financial backing—driven by their enduring profitability. This is starkly illustrated by the case of ExxonMobil, the top fossil fuel investment held by asset managers based in Ireland. In 2023, ExxonMobil reported €33.63 billion ($36 billion) in profit. That is almost twice the GDP of Botswana (€18.1 billion) and nearly three times Namibia’s GDP (€11.5 billion).

Ireland plays a hugely disproportionate role in facilitating investments into fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. In 2023, the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland generated an estimated 72.5 million tons of CO2e. This is more than the CO2e emissions for the entire country of Ireland—and more than ten times that generated by Sierra Leone.

The Global Human Impact

The climate crisis is here, now, and it is causing disproportionate harm in the Global South. In Bangladesh, rising sea levels and increasingly severe cyclones are displacing coastal communities, with projections indicating that 17% of the entire country could be underwater by 2050. The legally binding Paris Agreement on climate change explicitly acknowledges the importance of tackling private finance. Its three overarching goals are: keeping below 1.5C of warming; increasing adaptation and making finance flows consistent with low emissions and resilience.

This gives a clear mandate for action: both tax reform and corporate regulation are needed to tackle financial flows, and both nationally in Ireland and at EU level, ‘polluter pays’ taxes are lacking and regulation of the financial sector remains weak and fragmented. While EU regulation exists, it is designed more to nudge investors toward more sustainable investment practices by increasing transparency and reporting levels than to enforce strict standards. And it is moving in the wrong direction: the recently passed EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive excluded investments; and now the EU Commission’s Omnibus legislative proposal threatens to undo the limited gains made on climate plans, as well as blocking future attempts for stronger action at national level.

The Risk of Inaction

Fossil fuel investment is too profitable to remain weakly regulated. If Ireland continues with its current strategy of encouraging FDI at all costs, and relying on weak EU regulation, we are headed for catastrophe. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that every fraction of a degree beyond 1.5°C brings irreversible consequences: collapsed ice sheets, vanishing coral reefs, and extreme weather events that will make vast regions of the planet uninhabitable. And yet, companies are developing oil and gas fields that could push global warming beyond 2°C.

Our research found that 91% of the investments made into fossil fuel companies by investment managers based in Ireland were to companies that have plans for fossil fuel expansion like these. Ireland cannot afford inaction on this issue.

About This Research

The figures in this report regarding investment from Ireland are based on new research commissioned by ActionAid Ireland and Trócaire. In the paper, we uncover the scale of fossil fuel investment through Ireland, who the investors are, and in which fossil fuel companies they are investing. We analyse the current regulatory framework and explain why it is inadequate—and moving in the wrong direction. And we make specific recommendations for change, which are summarised below.

Summary of Recommendations

Regulate the private financial sector
Ireland must end its outsized role as an enabler of destructive fossil fuel investment. Ireland should introduce a strong gender-responsive national human rights and environmental due diligence framework which includes the regulation of investors with respect to human rights and the environment and climate. The transposition of the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive could achieve this if downstream activities are included and the Omnibus proposal is rejected. Ireland should prohibit investments in fossil fuel expansion and require investors to implement climate transition plans consistent with a 1.5°C climate limit.

Endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
Ireland should endorse developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to curb fossil fuel expansion and commit to a fair and funded phase out of fossil fuels.

Support tax justice
Ireland should support bold and fair new global tax rules through the UN Framework Convention on Tax, should adopt all OECD BEPS measures, and should conduct an updated and comprehensive spillover analysis of its tax policy. Ireland should take coordinated action globally, at the EU level and domestically to introduce a range of new taxes to mobilise finance needed for climate justice, based on ‘polluter pays’ and social equity principles such as wealth taxes for the highest earners, climate damages tax on investors, fossil fuel production taxes and levies on aviation and shipping.

Finance a just transition
Ireland must also meet its fair share climate finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, and pay our ecological debt to the Global South. Ireland should support conditionality-free debt cancellation for countries on the front lines of the climate crisis, commit to a new UN Framework Convention on Sovereign Debt, moving debt negotiations from the IMF to the UN, and to a debt workout mechanism that is fully representative and fair.

Palestine crisis: A message from a bleeding Gaza

As Israel continues its relentless attacks on Palestinian communities, ActionAid Palestine’s senior humanitarian programme officer, Samah Kassab, shares a powerful and heartbreaking message from Gaza.

The Profit Driving the Crisis

The Global Human Impact

The Risk of Inaction

About This Research

Summary of Recommendations

Further reading

Your Support in Action

The Reality of Occupation in the West Bank

World Cup is a risk for increased gender-based violence against women