KEIR STARMER receiving Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Downing Street the day after the country bombed negotiators in British ally Qatar shows our complicity in Israeli war crimes is unending.

It is difficult to be shocked, now, by ever more brazen outrages by Israel’s terroristic regime.

We have listened to the terrified voice of five-year-old Hind Rajab, alone in a car surrounded by her murdered family, pleading for rescue before she too was killed by Israeli soldiers. We have seen the horrific footage of Shaban al-Dalou, a patient in a hospital bed linked up to an IV drip, burning to death when that hospital was bombed by Israel. The world has watched aghast as the Israeli military turns distribution centres for food aid into shooting ranges where its soldiers use unarmed civilians for target practice.

Even so, the attack on Qatar breaks new ground. It is an assault on both the architecture and the principles of international diplomacy and conflict resolution.

So too of course was Israel’s unprovoked bombing of Iran in June, taking place on the eve of negotiations on that country’s civil nuclear power programme — and soon followed up by US bombing. Attempts to restart such talks have been hampered by Iran’s understandable view that there is no point, if your negotiating partner is allowed to drop bombs on you during the process.

The attack on Hamas negotiators in Qatar is an attack on the peace process. These are negotiators in talks Israel is supposedly engaged in, talks purportedly supported by Western powers including Britain and the United States, and talks hosted by a close ally of both, indeed one which hosts a significant US and British military presence.

This is an open declaration that Israel is not interested in peace — and cares little or nothing for the lives of its own remaining hostages in Gaza, something their relatives have already realised, hence the prominence of the hostages’ families in leading protests for a ceasefire within Israel. Israel is demanding unconditional surrender by Hamas: to be followed by the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population, a project supported by the lawless Donald Trump regime in Washington.

And it is an act of war that will discourage international efforts to resolve future conflicts. Why should a country make the effort to host peace negotiations if doing so makes it a target, and its allies effectively endorse it coming under attack? A Qatari citizen was killed alongside the Palestinians in Tuesday’s bombing. Trump claims he is “not thrilled” by it, but the White House followed that up by saying members of Hamas were legitimate targets — when participating in US-sponsored talks.

It is anyway inconceivable that Israel could bomb targets in the immediate vicinity of a US military base without Washington’s assent. Israel, encouraged and indulged by the most powerful country on Earth, is normalising acts of state violence without regard to borders or sovereignty, and in ways that will make wars everywhere harder to end.

It is an enemy of international law and of the nation-state system that underpins the United Nations: and, like the “maximum lethality not tepid legality” now announced as policy by the US, it is pushing us towards a world of total war.

Our government condemns Israel’s attack on Qatar in public but continues to back Israel in practice, as the Herzog visit shows. Its supply of training, logistical and surveillance support and weaponry to the Israeli military makes it part of the cabal of US-led states spreading disorder and conflict around the world: one reason the TUC’s vote this week to oppose rising military spending was an overdue recognition of the ugly reality of Britain’s international role.

Unions have stood up for peace: they must now throw their full weight behind the Palestine solidarity movement and bring political and industrial pressure to bear to end British complicity in genocide.