Ciara Mageean has received an onslaught of ‘horrible’ messages after sharing her views on Israel.

Since the Hamas attacks in October 2023, Israeli aggression in Gaza has killed over 70,000 Palestinians over the years and displaced over two million.

And in Lebanon, almost 4,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks, and over one million people have been displaced since March.

Earlier this month, the FAI announced that Ireland’s Nations League game against Israel in October will be played at a neutral venue without fans present; elsewhere, Ireland famously joined the 2026 Eurovision boycott.

Ciara believes Irish and international authorities should have taken a firmer stance from the get-go, and in her autobiography, My Greatest Race, she wrote that she ‘firmly believed’ Israel shouldn’t have been able to compete at the last European Championships as the state was ‘committing genocide’.

By voicing her opinion on the matter, however, Ciara has seen a rise in nasty comments in her DMs, even some that say she ‘deserves to die of cancer’, after revealing her battle with stage four bowel cancer.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Ciara said: ‘I’ve had horrible messages sent to me whenever I’ve shared those thoughts and wondered, “Maybe I should stop?” Because I’m going through enough right now, and I don’t need messages coming into my DMs and people posting on my Instagram page, saying that I deserve to die of cancer, calling me antisemitic whenever I’m saying that maybe people shouldn’t be murdered.

‘I’m not antisemitic. I just don’t think it’s right to kill innocent people, and I think they [those who call her antisemitic] do a huge injustice by trying to use it as a tool in that way.’

Ciara shared her belief that many are afraid to express their views on Israel’s actions for fear of being labelled antisemitic, saying: ‘Life is a lot easier if you just stay quiet and don’t speak out.’

But Ciara isn’t afraid to speak her mind, and thinks it’s ‘ridiculous’ that Israel isn’t facing the same repercussions in the sporting industry that Russia has in the recent past.

‘You shouldn’t live in a world where speaking out against murdering innocent men, women and children [is controversial],’ she said.

The athlete believes that ‘our country should speak up’, because the Irish population have always been ‘strong advocates for justice’. ‘We need to be that example,’ she said. ‘I just ask people: Where’s their humanity?’