There are no excuses for ignoring where Israel’s onslaught against Gaza would lead. After slaughtering seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, three Britons among them, Israeli authorities will subject us to a well-trodden strategy: deflect, delay, deceive, muddy the waters, hope attention moves elsewhere. We have seen this all before. As the Tory MP and chair of the foreign affairs select committee, Alicia Kearns, notes, nearly 11 weeks on, there has still been no explanation for why Israel bombed a Medical Aid for Palestinians compound in an official safe zone in mid-January.

These latest aid workers were travelling in a “deconflicted” zone, had coordinated their movements with Israeli forces on a pre-agreed route, and were in vehicles marked with large World Central Kitchen logos. They were struck three times, over the space of nearly a mile and a half; survivors even scrambled into the remaining cars before being hit again.

“Our forces unintentionally hit innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, glibly declares, while IDF sources tell the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that ill discipline by local commanders was responsible. They would have us believe the Israeli army is a ragtag coalition of warlords doing as they please. In reality, Israel’s scorched earth policy made this latest horror inevitable.

About 200 aid workers have been butchered by Israeli forces since October, an unprecedented bloodbath in recorded history. But they were mostly Palestinian, their lives cheap, their deaths largely ignored. What’s the plausible explanation........

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