What does it take for a genocide to reach a “tipping point”? What does it take for the UK government to concede that something beyond hellish is unfolding on its watch? We know the answer: it takes photographs of starving children to be splashed all over our TV screens and newspaper front pages.

It is 21 months since Israel launched its full scale invasion of Gaza; 20 months since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu; 14 months since the UN World Food Programme warned humanitarian operations were "near collapse"; three months since Unicef warned the four small aid hubs controlled by the [[Israel]]i and United States-backed [[Gaza]] Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) would be used as bait to forcibly displace the population; three weeks since a former GHF security contractor told the BBC he witnessed colleagues opening fire with machine guns on hungry Palestinians who posed no threat; and two weeks since The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported 875 people had been killed while trying to get food, 674 of them in the vicinity of GHF sites.

But not until it was confronted with the jutting out shoulder blades and shrivelled heads of emaciated children did the government sit up and take notice of a situation it had the power and the responsibility to prevent. And even then it’s mostly been empty words, with little action behind them.

Keir Starmer described the suffering as “unspeakable and indefensible”; but it is “unspeakable” only in the sense that he has chosen not to speak about it (and tried to prevent others doing so). And, by finding excuses for [[Israel]] – by declaring it had the right to switch off water and electricity, for example – he has himself defended it. Wilful ignorance is a form of complicity, but the Prime........

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