The band’s frontman, Bono – who is known for his humanitarian work and outspoken views on social justice – said he had previously tried to “stay out of Middle Eastern Politics” and admitted to previously “circling the subject” of the Israel-Hamas war since October 7, 2023.

“Everyone has long been horrified by what is unfolding in Gaza – but the blocking of humanitarian aid and now plans for a military takeover of Gaza City has taken the conflict into uncharted territory,” the band said.

In separate statements issued on the band’s social media and website on Sunday, they each condemned the prolonged suffering of Gazans and Israeli hostages in Gaza.

“I have generally tried to stay out of the politics of the Middle East… this was not humility, more uncertainty in the face of obvious complexity… I have over recent months written about the war in Gaza in The Atlantic and spoken about it in The Observer, but I circled the subject,” Bono said.

“The images of starving children on the Gaza Strip brought me back to a working trip to a food station in Ethiopia my wife Ali and I made 40 years ago next month following U2’s participation in Live Aid 1985. Another man-made famine.

“To witness chronic malnutrition up close would make it personal for any family, especially as it affects children. Because when the loss of non-combatant life en masse appears so calculated… especially the deaths of children, then ‘evil’ is not a hyperbolic adjective… in the sacred text of Jew, Christian, and Muslim it is an evil that must be resisted”.

Bono goes on to criticise Hamas for attacking innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023, in an attack that led to the deaths of 1,200 Israelis and saw more than 250 hostages taken into Gaza.

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“But I also understood that Hamas are not the Palestinian people… a people who have for decades endured and continue to endure marginalisation, oppression, occupation, and the systematic stealing of the land that is rightfully theirs. Given our own historic experience of oppression and occupation, it’s little wonder so many here in Ireland have campaigned for decades for justice for the Palestinian people.

“We know Hamas are using starvation as a weapon in the war, but now so too is Israel and I feel revulsion for the moral failure. The Government of Israel is not the nation of Israel, but the Government of Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu today deserves our categorical and unequivocal condemnation. There is no justification for the brutality he and his far right government have inflicted on the Palestinian people… in Gaza… in the West Bank. And not just since October 7, well before it too… though the level of depravity and lawlessness we are seeing now feels like uncharted territory,” Bono said.

Today’s News in 90 seconds – 11th August 2025

The U2 frontman then goes on to say that he has long believed in “Israel’s right to exist and supported a two-state solution,” but also wants to “make clear to anyone who cares to listen our band’s condemnation of Netanyahu’s immoral actions and join all who have called for a cessation of hostilities on both sides”.

The statement comes after Ireland along with Iceland, Luxembourg, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain, signed a letter condemning plans for Israel’s expansion of military aggression on Gaza.

The letter states that the countries “strongly condemn the recent announcement of the intensification of the occupation and the military offensive, including in Gaza city.”

“This decision will only deepen the humanitarian crisis and further endanger the remaining hostages’ lives. This operation will lead to an unacceptable high toll of deaths and the forced displacement of nearly one million Palestinian civilians,” it adds.

Benjamin Netanyahu again blamed many of Gaza’s problems on the Hamas militant group on Sunday, including civilian deaths, destruction and shortages of aid.

Mr Netanyahu pushed back against what he calls a “global campaign of lies” as condemnation of the plan grows both inside and outside Israel.

The Edge, in his statement, said that what is occurring in Gaza is a “test of our shared humanity”.

“I have three questions for Prime Minister Netanyahu. I ask them in the hope of engaging the conscience and sanity of the people of Israel.

First: Do you truly believe that such devastation—inflicted so intentionally and relentlessly on a civilian population—can happen without heaping generational shame upon those responsible? Do you not see that the longer this continues, the more Israel risks becoming isolated, mistrusted, and remembered not as a haven from persecution, but as a state that, when provoked, systematically persecuted a neighbouring civilian population?

“Second: If the end goal is, as the Likud platform suggests, the removal of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to make way for a “Greater Israel,” then that is not peace—it is dispossession; it is ethnic cleansing, and, according to many legal scholars, colonial genocide. It is an injustice on a massive scale. And injustice, as we learned in Ireland, is never the path to security: it breeds resentment, it hardens hearts, and it guarantees that future generations will inherit conflict rather than peace. The oppressed do not forget. How can this course of action possibly make your people safer?

“Third: If you reject the two-state solution—as your government now openly does—then what is your political vision? Simply perpetual conflict? A future of walls, blockades, military occupation? A state of permanent inequality? And if this apartheid state transpires don’t you destroy the very argument for Israel’s existence as a moral response to the horrors of the Holocaust? For if Israel comes to be seen as a state that systematically denies another people their rights, then the world will inevitably ask whether the only just and sustainable future, the only tolerable future, is a shared state—one where Jews and Palestinians live together as equals under the law.

We know from our own experience in Ireland that peace is not made through dominance. Peace is made when people sit down with their opponents—when they recognise the equal dignity of all, even those they once feared or despised”.

Adam Clayton said that the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza caused by Israel’s aid blockade and bombing looks like “revenge on a civilian population who are not responsible for Hamas’ murderous attack on October 7”.

“If Israel moves to colonise the Gaza Strip, it will permanently undo any possibility of lasting peace or solution for hostilities.

“Preserving civilian life is a choice in this war”.

Larry Mullen said that after the “slaughter” of innocent Israelis, including music fans that were murdered at the Nova Music Festival on the morning of the Hamas attack, Israel’s response and a ground war was “expected” but the “indiscriminate decimation of most homes and hospitals in Gaza, with a majority of those killed being women and children, was not expected.

“Imposing famine was not expected.

“It’s difficult to comprehend how any civilised society can think starving children is going to further any cause and be justified as an acceptable response to another horror. To state the obvious, starving innocent civilians as a weapon of war is inhumane and criminal.

“Where is the outrage from within Israel, outside of a small, if increasingly vocal, minority?

“Where is the outrage from the diaspora?

“Beyond some reluctant and muted acknowledgement of a famine inflicted, nothing.

“Silence.

“The power to change this obscenity is in the hands of Israel

“I undoubtedly support Israel’s right to exist and I also believe Palestinians deserve the same right and a state of their own.

“Silence serves none of us,” Mullen said.