Member's statement: West Bank: Current Situation

Member's statement by Ms Emma Sheerin on 18 November 2025.

MLA

Ms Emma Sheerin

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

18 November 2025

Type

Member's statement

Business

Members' Statements

Heading

West Bank: Current Situation

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5243944

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Last week, I visited the West Bank as part of an international delegation to discuss what is happening in Palestine. The West Bank is often referred to as the "normal" part of Palestine. Of course, there is nothing normal about a place where the Israeli settlers grade people as if they were meat. There is nothing normal about a system that determines your value on your identity. Even before we got there, in Jordan, I met Palestinians who had never been in their own country because they are not allowed. From my experience of the Jordanian border crossing, unpleasant as that was, it is not the hostility of the Israeli officials that I will remember, and not the dry heat, but the warmth and kindness and spirit of young Palestinians who went out of their way to make our experience easier, lifting our suitcases, pointing us in the right direction and trying to ease my obvious apprehension at being faced with a border crossing that I had no knowledge of prior to going through it. We then got into Ramallah and were told, "It's not that bad here". How twisted a world we live in when the barometer for suffering is babies starving to death in a place where the water is turned on once a week, where you can only go to work through border checkpoints and where you cannot leave the country. I met families who have never left the country because they are not allowed to. We then got to the university where we were having our congress, and I heard from students who had already been arrested and detained without trial, because getting educated in the West Bank is an act of resistance. I heard that they had buried five students from their one university in the past four years. Again, they said, "It is not that bad here". In Gaza, they knocked all their schools and universities to the ground, and yet such was the determination of those people that they walked for miles, set up school camps and educated their young people in the face of a genocide. We spoke to young people who told us how planting crops, as the Israelis steal the land from under them, is an act of resistance. I will carry those stories with me and continue to be a voice for the Palestinian people who seemingly cannot be heard by the rest of the Western world.

408 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:50 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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