JUST short of 80 years ago, on August 6 and August 9 1945, the US detonated atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the first, and so far only, times that nuclear explosions have been deployed in warfare.  

Aerial photographs of Hiroshima after the blast show almost total destruction, but still with some buildings standing. That’s more than there are now in most parts of north Gaza, where the Israeli military has been engaged in flattening almost everything, with conventional explosives.  

Even the BBC admitted last week that Israel has demolished thousands of buildings across Gaza since March, with entire towns and suburbs levelled in the past few weeks. Multiple legal experts have told BBC Verify that Israel may have committed war crimes under the Geneva Convention, which largely prohibits the destruction of infrastructure by an occupying power.  

In November last year the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants, citing alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Refusal of Western governments, including our own, to recognise those crimes has allowed Israel to continue with impunity.  

Al Jazeera has found that demolitions in Gaza’s southern Rafah Governorate have recently been stepped up sharply. It has been linked to the plan, announced by Israel’s defence ministry, to relocate 600,000 Palestinians into what observers say would be “concentration camps” in southern Gaza, with the intention of extending this to the strip’s entire population. Defence Minister Israel Katz said his government hopes to encourage Palestinians to “voluntarily emigrate” to other countries, adding that this plan “should be fulfilled.”  

In a scoop, US new web site Axios has reported that David Barnea, the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, visited Washington last week seeking US help in convincing countries — in particular Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya — to take hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza, a plan which US and Israeli legal experts have labelled a war crime.  

But the biggest war crimes of all have been, and continue to be, the killing of innocent Palestinians, by bombs, rockets, bullets and now the weapon of starvation. The Palestinian Forum in Britain has reported that, after 650 days, there are in Gaza 67,880 dead and missing, of whom over 19,000 are children, and 650,000 children starving.  

The Cradle, an online news magazine covering West Asia, reports that today, Israel killed at least 54 Palestinians in attacks across Gaza, 51 of whom were seeking food aid. On Saturday, over 130 were killed.  

Killing Palestinians indiscriminately, causing serious bodily or mental harm to others, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life designed to eliminate Palestinians in Gaza as a group — these are all actions which fall clearly within the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  

It is outrageous that, 80 years after the end of the second world war, which saw the genocide of Jewish, Roma and Sinti people in Europe, and the terrible massacres of Chinese people in occupied Manchuria, our own government is not only doing nothing about the genocide in Gaza, but is actively complicit in it, by continuing to provide Israel with military material and intelligence.  

That is why the demonstrations on Saturday by hundreds of thousands of people, in London, Edinburgh and elsewhere, are so important. Pressure must be maintained and stepped up on the government, and in fact, all MPs.  

That goes hand in hand with the urgent need to defend the right to peaceful protest. The government’s use of the “terrorism” label to stop direct action is intended to divert attention from its own culpability. But, as Andrew Murray said at the London demonstration, “Spilling red paint is not terrorism. Spilling the blood of thousands of Palestinian children is terrorism.”  

Those brave people who took a stand on Saturday against the ban on direct action deserve full support.