July 27, 2002	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 16,1423

DUBLIN, July 26: A press officer at the Israeli embassy in Dublin has been suspended after Irish newspapers on Friday published a letter she wrote strongly condemning Israel’s deadly air strike on Gaza City, a spokesman said.

Signing the letter in her capacity as press officer, Noreen O’Carroll, an Irish citizen, wrote that she wanted to add her voice to those “condemning utterly the horrific Israeli air force attack in Gaza” on Monday.

The bombing by an Israeli F-16 warplane killed the Hamas military chief Salah Shehade with his bodyguard and 13 civilians, including nine children.

“Israel’s government must take responsibility for this atrocity and do everything it can to prevent its air force doing this kind of thing in the future,” O’Carroll said in her letter to Irish national newspapers.

“I am sick at heart at this, as I am at each and every attack on Israeli citizens.

“But a missile attack on an apartment building, after midnight when children and adults are asleep in their beds, is no more justifiable than a suicide bombing.

“I am appalled and ashamed of the current Israeli government for sanctioning this and other similar operations,” O’Carroll added.

“I am also appalled and ashamed of Ariel Sharon’s cold-hearted response to it, stating that it was ‘one of our greatest successes’. Has he any heart, any moral sense at all?”—AFP