Under the milky, indifferent sky of Gaza City, eleven souls were plucked from existence yesterday by Israeli airstrikes. Their crime? Breathing air whilst being in the way of a precision weapon. The dust had barely settled when London, the city that brought us warm beer and parliamentary ping-pong, announced a 'fragile ceasefire push'. Fragile as a wet paper bag, more like.
But let us not get bogged down in the messy business of actual human suffering. Let's talk about the theatre. The Israeli Defence Force, with the subtlety of a flatulent elephant at a funeral, claimed the strike targeted a 'terrorist command centre' buried beneath a residential block. Of course it did. It always is. One imagines Hamas planners huddled over maps in a nursery, their Kalashnikovs dangling over cot mobiles.
Meanwhile, in the hallowed halls of Westminster, some chinless wonder with a surname double-barrelled enough to be a shotgun is probably polishing his spectacles and tutting into a bowl of lukewarm soup. 'We urge restraint,' they coo, as if restraint were a cuddly toy you could post to a bomb bay. 'Both sides must de-escalate,' they bleat, which is the diplomatic equivalent of telling a tsunami to be a bit less damp.
The sheer absurdity of it all would make a hyena weep. Eleven people. Dead. Their names? Irrelevant. Their hopes? A puff of smoke. Their homes? A punchline in a foreign secretary's briefing. The West, you see, has moved on. We've got a cost of living crisis. There's an election looming. And the shelves at Waitrose are dangerously low on artisanal crackers.
I'd offer a thought, a prayer, a moment of silence. But what's the point? Silence won't rebuild a school. Thoughts won't mend a child's shattered leg. Prayers? You can buy a round of prayers in any pub in London for two quid, and they'll taste as good as the real thing.
So here we are, trapped in this pantomime of peace. The fragile ceasefire push is a clown car, and the clowns are all driving it off a cliff. And in Gaza City, eleven families are learning that 'fragile' is just another word for 'permitted to die on someone else's schedule'.
I'm going to need another gin. And perhaps a new profession.
