PALESTINIAN children in Gaza are still dying because of Israel’s brutal assaults from air, land and sea on this overcrowded and impoverished territory.

Seventy two hours is not enough to bury all the dead and patch up all the wounded from previous weeks of bombing.

But Israel, with the complicity of Egypt, the US and European states, including Britain, insists that surrender by Hamas and other resistance groups must accompany any respite.

That is the substance behind Tel Aviv’s insistence on the “demilitarisation” of Gaza.

It is a demand that one side — that of the oppressed — should give up its puny arsenal while the regional superpower that pursues ethnic cleansing to effect a one-state solution from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river remains armed to the teeth.

Even in the face of the inhuman slaughter visited upon Palestinian civilians and their abject grief at the loss of their children, the population of Gaza has rejected the surrender call.

Palestinians know that the rockets of Hamas and Islamic Jihad cannot have the same dreadful effecton Israelis as their occupier’s air force, navy and army inflict routinely on homes, mosques, schools, hospitals and markets in Gaza.

Their hope is that the anger of the people of the world may yet prick the consciences of the political leaders who back Israel.

Just one British minister has resigned on principle over the state terrorist onslaught against Gaza, although a number of coalition MPs and even some Liberal Democrat ministers have spoken out.

The Labour opposition has criticised Israel, but still feels the need to dust off the old mantra of Israel’s right to defend itself as though the zionist state and its citizens are under serious threat.

The Netanyahu government admitted there is no threat when it told nervous airlines to resume flights to Tel Aviv because Israel’s US-supplied Iron Dome protective shield could cope with any rocket barrage from Gaza.

Ed Miliband has demeaned Hamas as “terrorist” and condemned “the murder of Israeli soldiers.”

Terrorist is a label pinned by imperialist powers and their politicians on those who resist their rule. Every freedom fighter worth their salt, from Nelson Mandela to the French Resistance and also including leaders of the Jewish armed groups in pre-1948 Palestine, attracted this sobriquet.

Civilians in Gaza undoubtedly see invading Israeli troops as terrorists and fully meriting the fate dozens have suffered at the hands of the Palestinian resistance.

Miliband, in common with a growing number of critics of Israel, urges “an immediate ceasefire and a long-term solution to this tragic conflict,” which sounds laudable, but it ignores the key issue of what blocks this from happening.

It is Israel’s single-minded attachment to a one zionist state approach, with Palestinians driven from the land of their birth to make way for Jewish colonists.

Tel Aviv needs war or the constant threat of conflict to justify its refusal to negotiate the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in line with UN resolutions.

Its ruthless reduction of Gaza is far from accidental. 

It is intended to replicate Deir Yassin and other 1948 massacres to excite panic and induce Palestinian flight to assist the preferred designation of Israel as a solely Jewish state.

Without identifying Israel as the barrier to justice and without putting pressure on Tel Aviv by backing the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, pious demands for a negotiated solution are merely words.