A terrible tipping point in Gaza has been reached. The number of people admitted to hospital or dying from starvation has surged. The journalists’ union for Agence France-Presse (AFP) has issued a statement warning that “without intervention, the last reporters in Gaza” will die of hunger.

This is horribly shocking, but it is no surprise: after all, we are now more than 140 days into Israel’s total siege on Gaza. In May, Israel abolished the UN’s effective method of delivering aid in favour of a dystopian system in which Palestinians are forced to compete for a trickle of often unusable aid, and are shot at while doing so. About 1,000 civilians have been murdered while seeking food since the end of May. “There is no case since World War II of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled,” declares Alex de Waal, one of the world’s leading experts on hunger. Under the Geneva conventions, “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”.

Against this backdrop, on Monday the former Tory cabinet minister Kit Malthouse stood up in parliament and asked the foreign secretary, David Lammy, if he did “not see the personal risk to him, given our international obligations, that he may end up at The Hague because of his inaction?” Lammy bent over the dispatch box and adopted a tone of solemn disappointment, as one might do when seeking to rise above an unprovoked insult. “I have to tell him that it demeans his argument when he personalises it in the way that he does,” he shot back.

But Malthouse did not resort to abuse. Indeed, the presiding deputy speaker did not reprimand him for unparliamentary language. Lammy intentionally conflated scrutiny with personal attack to avoid answering the question. Alas, like our prime minister, he is a lawyer by trade, and he should know that the genocide convention of 1948 identifies five punishable acts: one of them is “complicity in genocide”. He should know that........

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