Six months ago tomorrow we woke up to images on our TV screens of such horrific brutality that few who watched will ever forget.
The contempt for human life shown by Hamas terrorists as they went on a killing spree in southern Israel was as chilling as it was barbaric.
The world expected that the Israeli military machine would wreak a vicious revenge for the slaughter of 1,200 innocents, the capture of 240 hostages and the committing of many unspeakable atrocities.
Most politicians in Britain and the USA called it their right to self-defence.
And even when Israel’s response went way past that, with tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children slaughtered, millions of Gazans forced into tents miles from their home, aid trucks halted, hunger rampant and the Strip reduced to rubble, still they held the line about a right to self-defence.
Until this week, when seven aid workers, three of them British, who had coordinated their movements with the Israeli military, were killed by missiles. Suddenly Rishi Sunak said he was “appalled” and that Israel’s conduct was becoming “increasingly intolerable”. Joe Biden claimed to be “outraged and heartbroken”.
Well, what took them so long to express the anger and repulsion that the majority of their citizens have been feeling for many months? Or rather, in Britain’s case, why did it take the killing of three of our own to finally register our disgust with Benjamin Netanyahu? What about the other 196 aid workers, scores of medical staff and journalists and 33,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, killed since October 8?
Was that not appalling and heartbreaking?
Disgracefully, it took the Labour Party four months to call for an immediate ceasefire and the UK and US governments five months. And still we sell the disgraced Israel Defence Forces the weapons that extend the slaughter.
Well, six months of this madness is enough. International law is being blatantly ignored and war crimes clearly committed.
So long as this country keeps selling the IDF weapons all Britons are participants by default in a massacre of Biblical proportions.
We’ve had enough of watching Netanyahu dismiss murders of every civilian as a “consequence of war,” his media spokespeople lie to journalists about the shelling of hospitals and members of the most right-wing government Israel has ever seen calling for Gaza to be nuked and sent back “to the Stone Age”.
We are sickened to hear of 300,000 people trapped in northern Gaza eating animal feed to stay alive as the UN declares that an entirely human-made famine is “imminent”.
The atrocity of October 7 has been more than avenged. The world watched insatiable fanatics kill for pleasure that day, but it has also permitted insatiable fanatics on the other side to do the same ever since. We are allowing a humanitarian catastrophe, and some would argue a genocide, to happen in front of our eyes. The Israeli government may scoff at talk of a genocidal mission but the rate of their killings certainly aligns with one.
Britain and the USA must seriously pressurise Israel for an immediate ceasefire, the opening of not just some, but all border crossings to let in aid, stop selling them arms, persuade Hamas to release the hostages then let the decent Israelis set Netanyahu adrift from his hope of a forever war.
Six months of barbarism avenging barbarism is enough.