Listen, readers. I've spent decades marinating my liver in gin and watching the world burn from a bar stool, but even I am struggling to find the darkly comic angle in this latest atrocity. A hospital in Gaza, a place supposed to be a sanctuary for the sick and dying, has been reduced to rubble by yet another 'precision' strike. Dozens dead. Dozens more bleeding out on the floor. And British aid agencies, those paladins of performative outrage, have wasted no time in condemning the 'targeting of medical sites.' As if the bombs care about your fucking signage.
Let's be clear: this is not a war. This is a demolition derby with human beings as the wreckage. The Israelis, the Palestinians, the endless parade of politicians who treat the Middle East like a badly-written soap opera, they all share the blame. But above all, the real culprit is the international community, a gang of sanctimonious wankers who send 'thoughts and prayers' while arming both sides to the teeth.
I remember a time when war had rules. When you didn't bomb hospitals, you didn't target journalists, and you definitely didn't use white phosphorus on children. But those days are as dead as the bodies piling up in the morgues. Now we have 'surgical strikes' that manage to miss every military target and hit exactly the playground, the bakery, the maternity ward. It's almost impressive, if it weren't so grotesque.
And what of our beloved British aid agencies? They tut, they tweet, they issue sternly worded press releases. They demand investigations that will never happen, call for ceasefires that will be broken within hours. They are the moral conscience of a nation that doesn't have one. They are the people who clap for the NHS at 8pm while voting for governments that gut it. Hypocrisy, thy name is Whitehall.
I've interviewed dozens of aid workers over the years. Lovely people, genuinely committed. But they operate in a system designed to fail. They patch up wounds while the surgeons of state open new ones. They hand out bread while the drones drop death. They are the band-aids on a severed artery.
The real story here is not the strike itself. We all knew it would happen. The only surprise is that it took this long. No, the real story is our collective desensitisation. The way we scroll past these headlines on our phones, pausing only to click 'like' on a particularly poignant photo, before returning to the far more important matter of what to have for dinner. We have become connoisseurs of catastrophe, sampling atrocities like fine wines, savouring the vintage of each fresh horror.
I'll tell you what I think: the only way this ends is when the cash runs out. When the arms manufacturers stop making a profit. When the politicians can no longer use this conflict as a convenient distraction from their domestic failures. But that day is a long way off. Until then, we will continue to witness these 'breaking news' alerts, these tragedies wrapped in euphemisms, these lies dressed up as diplomacy.
So raise a glass, dear reader. Not to the dead, because that would be too respectful. But to the absurdity of it all. To the sheer, breathtaking hypocrisy of a world that claims to value life while raining death from the skies. To the British aid agencies who will issue their condemnations and then go home to their comfortable homes, shaking their heads at the savagery of it all. And to you, the reader, who will absorb this horror and then move on, because moving on is the only sane response to an insane world.
Bottoms up. The next round is on the UN.
