By IRNA,
London : Nobel peace laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire has accused Israel of committing “slow genocide” against the Palestinian people after being forcefully prevented from delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
“Gaza has been cut off from the world for over three years. The people of Gaza don’t have enough basic things for their needs,” 66-year old Maguire said after being deported by Israel with four other Irish activists aboard the MV Rachel Corrie.
“It’s Israeli policies that are causing this — there is a slow genocide of the Palestinian people,” she said at a press conference in Dublin on Monday.
Maguire, who was born in Belfast, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976 after co-founding the Community of Peace People in Northern Ireland and has since won several other awards.
Last year, she also accused Israel of “carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians” before being deported after spending a week in an Israeli prison when previously accompanying an intercepted small ferry carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza.
At the press conference, Maguire again pledged to return in another attempt to break Israel’s three-year siege but suggested that the US could play a key role.
“US President Barack Obama has the power to say to the Israeli government, ‘enough is enough, your policy is not acceptable and you must choose peace’,” she said.
When Obama was named as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, she said giving the award “to the leader of the most militarized country in the world, which has taken the human family against its will to war, will be rightly seen by many people around the world as a reward for his country’s aggression and domination.”