AL QUDS, July 28: An Israeli embassy employee in Ireland who wrote a letter condemning last Tuesday’s Israeli bombing raid on Gaza, which killed a top militant and 14 bystanders, has been suspended, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Yaffa Ben-Ari said on Sunday.

The suspension was pending further inquiry, Ben-Ari said.

In the letter, published Friday in the Irish Times, embassy press officer Dr. Noreen O’Carroll slammed the bombing raid as “an atrocity” and said the Israeli government had to do “everything it can to prevent its air force from doing this kind of thing in the future”.

The attack, she said, was “no more justifiable than a suicide bombing” carried out by Palestinian militants.

O’Carroll, an Irish resident who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Dublin, noted that there was a “huge divergence of opinion” in Israel regarding the policies of the current Israel government, and said she wanted it put on record that this debate “also extends to the ‘local staff’ of the Israeli Embassy”.

Acting Ambassador Boaz Rodkin was quoted on Israel Radio as saying that an embassy employee was not permitted to publicly express disagreement with state policy.

ISRAEL ARRESTS: Four Palestinians, including a local chief of Islamic Jihad, were arrested on Sunday by Israeli troops who swept a West Bank village and destroyed a house of an assassinated militant, Islamic Jihad sources said.