RECKLESS and genocidal, Israel’s government is now bent on an impossible-seeming intensification of its Gaza atrocities nearly 22 months into the invasion.

Plans to occupy Gaza City will inevitably lead to thousands more deaths. Not as “collateral damage,” the cynical term for bystanders blown up in bombing raids targeting militants.

There is now abundant evidence that the murder of civilians is entirely deliberate, meticulously compiled by organisations from Medecins San Frontieres — whose report this week detailing the “orchestrated killing” being carried out through the sick pretence of delivering food aid — to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, whose Our Genocide report found that “unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking co-ordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip” — through systematic destruction of educational and cultural institutions and the artificial imposition of mass starvation.

Militarily, Israel’s apartheid regime considers itself on the up and up. Its troops kill where they please in Gaza, and co-ordinate with illegal settlers the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank.

It continues to bomb neighbouring states at will, having severely weakened the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon and expanded its illegal occupation of Syrian territory well beyond the Golan Heights: its dramatic interventions in renewed fighting in Syria’s Sweida region, including the casual bombing of the Syrian Defence Ministry in Damascus, underlining its determination to ensure the outcome of the Syrian civil war is yet another failed state, internally fragmented and unable to control its territory or secure its borders.

Above all, Israel’s sense of impunity — built up over decades in which its Western allies paid lip service to a Palestinian state while funding and arming governments in Tel Aviv that were systematically colonising what remained of Palestine — has reached new heights since the far-right demagogue in the White House departed from the old verities, himself suggesting the removal of the native Palestinian population of Gaza and now insinuating there is no crime that will not be given a free pass by Washington — it is “up to Israel” what happens to Palestine.

But that sense of impunity must be shattered, and can be, by the unprecedented strength and determination of the international movement in solidarity with Palestine.

What Benjamin Netanyahu sees as strengths can be turned into weaknesses. This is nowhere truer than of Washington’s abandonment of its longstanding pretence of concern for a future Palestinian state.

The mass movement is forcing US allies to distance themselves from the superpower. The French, British and Canadian governments have been dragged into reluctant, heavily caveated proposals to recognise a Palestinian state this autumn. The German government, the most repressive in Europe against Palestine solidarity — one which has even proposed recognition of the legitimacy of another state, Israel, as a condition of citizenship of its own — has been forced to call a halt to the arms sales.

These measures are grossly inadequate and will not stop the slaughter in Palestine. But their very reluctance shows that governments are being moved against their will: and can be moved further.

It is a time to redouble the pressure on all fronts.

The Canterbury protester who is now taking legal action against Kent Police for being threatened with arrest under an expansive interpretation of the ban on supporting Palestine Action is striking a blow for our freedoms and against an unaccountable police force.

Defend Our Juries, in its courageous work to inform the public of their rights and to overturn the unjustifiable Palestine Action ban despite censorship of its website, is calling out an overbearing state which has likely overreached in its desperation to silence us.

And the national demonstration for Palestine tomorrow, showing the peace movement will not be cowed by arrests and prosecutions, is speaking for the majority in Britain. No politician should be let off the hook on Palestine.