ANOTHER DAY, another massacre or two in Gaza, another day of complicity in genocide by the Labour Party leadership.
Shortly before the Morning Star went to press yesterday, news came through of an Israeli air strike on a residential apartment block in the town of Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza.
At least 72 residents — one-third of them children — have been reported dead by Al Jazeera, with dozens more lying dead or alive beneath the ruins, beyond the immediate reach of civil emergency and medical teams.
This takes the number of Palestinian corpses somewhere north of 43,846 since October 7 last year, when — lest we should ever forget — a Hamas-led incursion into Israel killed an estimated 1,139 Israeli civilians and soldiers and captured several hundred more.
It’s not clear whether the death toll in Gaza includes the 20 or more civilians killed in Israeli attacks on a UN-run school in the Shati refugee camp shortly before the Beit Lahiya massacre and on the Bureij camp around the same time.
In any event, these Israeli actions were savage enough to elevate their coverage on the main BBC News bulletins from 12th place on Saturday morning (behind Russian air raids on Ukraine, London bus fares, social care, assisted dying, inheritance tax, rugby, football, tennis, US basketball, Ultimate Fighting Championship news also from the US, and golf) to sixth place by early afternoon, ahead of the sports, and eventually into second.
Obviously, the latest Russian attacks on energy facilities and residential buildings in Ukraine (with at least 10 people dead) were deemed far more important than yet more murderous Israeli air raids on refugee camps, schools and multi-storey apartments. Cue a procession of Polish and US commentators to condemn Russian aggression.
As the true scale of the latest slaughter in Gaza finally dawned on the BBC, its security correspondent — and former British army officer — Frank Gardner updated his live-feed reports from Jerusalem accordingly (Israel has banned all foreign media workers from occupied Gaza).
He dropped his earlier mentions of October 7 and Israel’s claims to be using “precision-guided munitions” in targeted efforts to stop Hamas regrouping.
He struggled to maintain the required BBC veneer of “balance.” By mid-afternoon, his efforts to seek the views of the misnamed Israeli Defence Force had still elicited no response beyond the usual bogus promise to investigate and report back.
At least this spared viewers the familiar but gruesome spectacle of a psychopathic Israeli automaton pouring out the usual torrent of lies without fear of contradiction.
Instead, Gardner remarked on the frequently high number of civilian deaths resulting from IDF “targeted” operations, describing the images — rarely if ever shown on the BBC — of Palestinian bodies being pulled from the rubble as “horrific.”
Meanwhile, in these and other cases, the Israeli authorities claim that their strikes are targeted at Hamas operational centres, with the greatest care taken to avoid civilian casualties through the issue of warning notices and forced evacuations.
Were this true, it would mean that Hamas has been operating from 370,000 civilian homes and almost every school, hospital, university building and refugee camp across the whole of Gaza.
In any event, nothing of this carnage has moved Keir Starmer, David Lammy or any other Labour Cabinet minister to condemn Israel’s crimes against humanity.
They maintain what is arguably the most shameful foreign policy stance in Labour Party history. They do so despite the mountain of evidence that not even our broadcasting media and gutter press can conceal.
And every party member who joins in the kind of standing ovation seen for Starmer at last week’s Welsh Labour conference is tolerating the Labour government’s complicity in Israeli genocide.
