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Ireland Embassy cites 2010 Mossad operation as reason not to trust Israel, but deletes tweet

November 8, 2021 at 4:52 pm

Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Simon Coveney [EU2017EE Estonian Presidency/Wikipedia]

Ireland’s Embassy in Israel expressed its distrust of Israel and its anger at the intelligence agency, Mossad’s forging of Irish passports a decade ago, in a tweet which it later deleted.

Responding to a Twitter user—under a Jerusalem Post article which reported Irish Foreign Minister, Simon Coveney, saying Israel had not proven six Palestinian NGOs banned by Israel were terrorist organisations —the Irish Embassy in Israel yesterday stated that “Diplomatic relations might count for something, but if they have been abused to forge our passports for use in assassinations, it might be understandable that trust could be affected.”

The incident the embassy was referring to was that of the Mossad’s assassination of Hamas commander, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, in a Dubai hotel room, when the agents used forged passports to enter the United Arab Emirates (UAE), prior to its normalisation with Tel Aviv last year.

READ: Ireland shows the way over Israel’s de-facto annexation of Palestine

The other countries whose passports were used by the Mossad agents were France, Germany, the UK and Australia, which have all maintained good ties with Israel. The tweet by the Irish embassy, however, appears to show that Ireland still harbours ill feelings towards the incident and Israel’s forging of Irish passports.

The tweet, which was deleted hours later, also reveals the incident as a cause of Dublin’s mistrust of Israel’s designation of six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organisations two weeks ago. That designation was issued due to their alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), with Israel citing as evidence the NGO officials participating in an event mourning a senior PFLP member.

Those designations put strain on relations between Ireland and Israel, however, as two of the NGOs —Al-Haq and Adameer—are partly funded by Ireland. Dublin has, so far denied the evidence presented by Tel Aviv, with Coveney having insisted that “We have not gotten any credible evidence to link the NGOs to terrorism, certainly not that I have seen … We have very robust systems of knowing where our money is spent and how it is spent.”

READ: Pro-Israel treason in Ireland