I love football. I have played football since I was aged five. One of the things I love about football is it is young people all over the world playing the beautiful game, doing something beautiful. What Israel is doing to Palestinian children is the very antithesis of what football is about because it is ugly, murderous and genocidal. A very significant part of Israel’s decades-long genocidal campaign against the Palestinians is its desire to murder Palestinian children, including the children who play football. Back in 2015, more than a decade ago, I read out a quote from among many from ministers. One particularly stuck out by Ayelet Shaked, a Knesset MP who later became minister for justice, talking about Palestinian children. He said, "They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more snakes will be raised." That was his attitude and he became a minister after saying that. That is the altitude of the Israeli regime towards Palestinian children that has led it to kill more than 350 children who play football in the past three years, more than 1,000 mostly young people who play sports of various kinds. One of those children was a young man called Muhammad Khalifa. I was very proud to be part of organising one leg of soccer events involving Muhammad Khalifa's team, Al-Hilal in Gaza. They played in Ballybrack as well as elsewhere in the country. He was aged 12 the time in 2016. A decade later, he was massacred along with seven members of his family and his brother. He had gone on to play for the Palestinian national youth team and he was wiped out by an Israeli attack which wiped out his entire family. He played hurling while he was here. He met the President. It was such a beautiful thing. His life was extinguished along with hundreds of other young people playing football by a regime that treats young Palestinians playing football and young children as snakes to be wiped out. That is the psychosis of the Israeli regime and that is why it must not be normalised. The idea of normalising it by playing a game of football against a state that does that to children is disgusting. The Government should support the boycott and stop the game.

Sentiment score: 0.12