On October 7, agents of the Hamas military from the Gaza Strip attacked the state of Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking over 240 people hostage. Since then, Israel has attacked the Gaza Strip, where over 30,000 people had died as of late February. Since then, the ongoing war has been the subject of much protest. Student protests on college campuses have gotten a lot of attention as of late, but it's happening around the world, including in Ireland, where Game of Thrones veteran Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth) — currently appearing in 3 Body Problem on Netflix — attended a protest led by Irish-Palestinian man Ahmed Alagha last week, according to the Independent.
Cunningham, who has been involved in pro-Palestinian solidarity campaigns for four decades, said that people in his industry have told them that they support his campaigning. “What concerns me is that the people who do care and are not doing anything are, in my opinion, worse than the people who don’t care," he said. “That it sits well with them, they can ignore it.”
"The internet doesn’t forget. When this comes around, when the ICJ (International Court of Justice) and ICC (International Criminal Court) hopefully do their work honorably, it is going to come out. And the people who didn’t talk – it is not going to be forgotten. It’s livestreamed this genocide – and the option to say you didn’t know is not an option. You did know and you did nothing, you stayed quiet. I need to be able to look in the mirror and that’s why I speak."
In late March, the ICJ — the top court in the United Nations — issued a unaninous decision saying that Israel must comply with international organizations trying to move food into the Gaza Strip, where famine is "setting in." The ICC is investigating both the Hamas attack on Isreal and Israel's actions in Gaza, but Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that whatever decisions the ICC makes will not affect "Israel's actions."
“This bombardment and genocide has to stop for a number of reasons,” Liam Cunningham continued. “Obviously, the horrors that is happening to the Palestinian people and the ongoing apartheid. For another reason to protect ourselves. If we allow ourselves to accept this behaviour, then we allow it to happen to us. We have to stand up for standards. We have to stand up for international law and it reduces us as human beings if we don’t.”
At the protest Cunningham attended, Alagha said that 44 memebers of his extended family had died during Israel's attacks in Gaza. “It is no surprise because in the Gaza Strip there are no safe locations to hide out from, to make an attempt to keep your family safe and sound. There is no region that is safe there."
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