MORE PHOTOS FROM SATURDAY'S PALESTINE SOLIDARITY PROTEST IN LONDON COMING SOON.

I was deeply shocked that James Cleverly, the UK's foreign secretary, when interviewed about the intensification of the siege of Gaza, failed to even criticize Israel's decision to impose a ban on electricity, fuel, food and water entering, with well over 2 million people living within the Gaza Strip.

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This brutal form of collective punishment is clearly a genocidal war crime which endangers the lives of millions, even without the round the clock bombing which has already killed over 100 Palestinian children and 7 journalists.

Israel's prime minister Netenyahu has called on Palestinian civilians to flee the air strikes he has unleashed which is reducing much of Gaza to rubble, but the two neighbouring states, Israel and the Egyptian dictatorship of Fatah Abdul El-Sisi, have sealed the borders, making any attempt to escape the strip suicidal.

When Goav Gallant, Israel's Defence Minister, announced the intensification of the siege of Gaza, he added that "we are fighting against human animals," phraseology often favoured by genocidal regimes. The United States and Britain, which have effectively given the green light to these brutal measures of collective punishment, are now clearly complicit in this war crime, and in Israel's war of aggression against a tiny strip of land, which for years has been under what the UN recognises as Israeli occupation, since its inhabitants enjoy as much autonomy as prisoners of war with only the right to say cook their own meals, while Israel controls everything that is allowed in, and regularly acts every few years to cripple Gazan infrastructure with air strikes, so that even before these latest attacks, only 10% of Gazans had access to clean drinking water while the level of anemia among young children was around 59%.

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No right minded person would not also condemn the brutal and horrific Hammas attacks on Israeli civilians, but we have to understand that terrorism can not be eradicated by continuing, intensifying and expanding the 75 year long occupation. It is the crime of illegal occupation which encompasses and leads to (though that's not the same as justifying) the near inevitability of violence by those few Palestinians, deprived of any real long term ability to resist Israel's armed forces, turn to other inexcusable means, sometimes irrational, horrific and counterproductive brutality. We should rightly condemn such violence, but it is unlikely to stop without an end to the occupation.

It is noteworthy that 248 Palestinians had been killed during 2023 even before last Saturday, but these deaths attracted almost no attention in the Western media. Meanwhile, Palestinian homes continue to be bulldozed to make way for new illegal Israeli settlements and when Netenyahu addressed the UN General Assembly in September he displayed a map of the Middle East with an "Israel", outlined in blue, which clearly included within it all of the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a de facto way of announcing their annexation.