Stop the slaughter of youngsters in Gaza – or we are going to all have blood on our fingers

Never doubt the generosity of British people when they are moved by tragic sights, especially ones involving children. Last November, £33.5 million was donated to Children in Need and more than £400,000 has been raised in less than a fortnight for those poor Southport families who are reeling from the deaths of their beautiful daughters.

So it is as astonishing as it is heartbreaking that the horrific images coming out of Gaza haven’t had many millions of us marching on Westminster telling those who act in our name that their indifference to the wilful slaughter of children by the Israeli state is shameful. And that we need to start paying more than lip service to the stories of innocents being murdered with our effective backing.

Stories like those in the past week of three-month-old baby Reem Abu Hayyah left orphaned after an Israeli airstrike wiped out her parents and five young siblings. In a separate strike, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin four-day-old babies, Asser and Ayssel, while he was at a local government office registering their births.

The rate of child slaughter is unprecedented in modern war. Israel denies it is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure but the EU said at least 10 schools have been targeted in the past few weeks alone and Save the Children claim school attacks are happening at least weekly, with three in one 48-hour period recently. How are those attacks not blatant war crimes?

Israel’s 10-month indiscriminate bombing of Gaza has killed 17,000 children with 2,100 of them under the age of two. It has left so many orphans (the UN puts the figure at 18,000) that doctors have invented a new acronym when registering them: WCNSF (Wounded Child, No Surviving Family).

Meanwhile, our government tells the UN that the UK is “appalled” by these strikes on schools and “horrified” by reports of detainees being raped in Israeli prisons while lamenting that, “Palestinians have nowhere safe to turn”.

But words aren’t good enough from a country that took five months to call for a ceasefire and is still licensing arms sales to the IDF butchers. Especially when they know those words will be scoffed at by the fanatical hawks in Tel Aviv who believe they are on a “justified and moral” mission to send Gaza back to the Stone Age as revenge for the barbarous Hamas attack last October that claimed 1,139 Israeli lives.

However, by any reckoning – with 40,000 Palestinians dead and a further 10,000 estimated to be buried under rubble – that vengeance was surely long ago sated. How much longer can Western governments keep trotting out the line that Israel has a right to defend itself at any cost?

Since coming to power Labour has dropped its objections at the International Criminal Court to arrest warrant proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu and is considering a partial arms embargo on Israel. That embargo needs to be full and begin now with pressure piled on Joe Biden to withhold arms sales to Netanyahu until he stops sabotaging the prospect of a meaningful ceasefire.

Because Israel is at best knowingly committing a criminal humanitarian catastrophe of Biblical proportions
in Gaza or, at worst, carrying out a genocide. And the blood of those slaughtered children is on all of our hands.