Under the light drizzle of a Tuesday morning last month, Ríonach Ní Néill and a group of friends set up a small platform in front of the United States Embassy in Dublin.
Then they took out a stack of papers. For the next 11 and a half hours, Ms. Ní Néill and others took turns reading out thousands of names — each one a person killed since Israel started bombarding Gaza in the war, according to a list released by the Gazan health authorities.
It was an attempt to convey the enormity of the loss of life, she said.
“I think the baseline really in Ireland is that human rights are valued, and what’s happening now is the destruction of universal human rights,” said Ms. Ní Néill, 52, an artist from Galway. “This is not something that can be ignored.”
In Ireland, support for Palestinian civilians runs deep, rooted in what many see as a shared history of British colonialism and the experience of a seemingly intractable and traumatic conflict, which in Ireland’s case came to a close with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, according to the Israeli authorities, and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza, Ireland has emerged as something of an outlier in Europe for its stance on the conflict.
While condemning the Hamas atrocities, lawmakers across Ireland’s political spectrum were among the first in Europe to call for the protection of Palestinian civilians and denounce the scale of Israel’s response, which has left more than 15,000 people dead, according to health officials in Gaza — a rate of casualties with few precedents in the 21st century.