On17 April, an Israeli air strike on the Gazan city of khan Yunis wiped out an entire Palestinian family of ten, including 4 women and 5 children. This family was not the target; they were merely collateral damage. The target, according to the IDF, was Hamas operatives.

That is a formula used by Israel to excuse any bloodshed, be it a hospital, school or tented refugee camp: ”We were targeting a Hamas command and control centre.”

When continuing their undeclared war on Lebanon, the excuse is that Hezbollah was the target and any other casualties, as usual, were unfortunate collateral damage.

Gaza is increasingly like the holocaust revisited. It is a concentration camp holding 2 million Palestinians in overcrowded, insanitary conditions. The people are denied food, water, fuel and medicines. This withholding of humanitarian supplies is persistently denied by the Israeli government, but is equally persistently confirmed by the UN and other aid organisations.

There are no gas chambers and crematoria, but the population is daily bombarded, regardless of any ceasefire arrangements.

Over 1,700 Israeli troops have been killed in the Gaza war and over 52,000 Palestinians. Additionally, there must be hundreds of Palestinian bodies buried under the mountainous piles of rubble, because rescue operations were severely hampered, or rendered impossible, by lack of heavy lifting equipment.

Even before the Second world War, the Allies were well aware of the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry. Nevertheless, there was resistance to any sizable Jewish refugee immigration into Britain. The British war Cabinet was fully informed of Hitler’s Final Solution and the role of Auschwitz and the other death camps. Auschwitz and the rail routes to it could have been bombed, but there were strategic or logistical reasons for not doing so, all of them questionable. The genocide taking place in occupied Europe perhaps could not have been stopped, but the operation of the Nazis’ death camps could have been severely hampered.

Instead, the plight of the Jews, Poles and Roma was left untended and the war rolled on.

Since the Holocaust there have been other genocides. In Rwanda, Hutu militias slaughtered Tutsi and other minorities, while the world stood by. The Yizidis of Iraq were murdered while the world stood by. The Rohigya people of Myanmar were killed and displaced and ignored. The Uyghurs of China have been left to their own devices while nations of the world devote their attention to their own interests.

Throughout March and April, Israel has blockaded Gaza against all humanitarian aid. Severely injured children still have limbs amputated without anaesthetic in the remaining makeshift hospitals.

The trigger-happy IDF recently assassinated a group of 15 medical aid workers, claiming their convoy was suspiciously travelling at night, without notice and in unmarked vehicles. The IDF buried the bodies and the shot-up vehicles and the truth came out only when a video of the  incident was found on the phone of one of the dead medics.

 

The British government regrets the suffering of the people of Gaza, but continues supplying Israel with the weaponry to press on with the genocide of the Palestinians.

Keir Starmer and David Lammy are in thrall to Trump and Netanyahu, who label all criticism as anti-Semitism. While the criminal extremists of the Israeli government reporise the crimes of the Nazis, our political leaders have learned nothing from the blood-soaked history of the 20th century? Have they no conscience? How do they manage to sleep at night?