IN FAILING to call for a ceasefire, New Zealand has joined the United States and other western governments in signalling to Israel that it may carry on with its barbaric assault on the people of Gaza. In a joint statement by outgoing Prime minister Chris Hipkins and former Foreign Minister Nania Mahuta (and agreed to by Chris Luxon) New Zealand has effectively given its approval for the slaughter in Gaza to continue.

In calling for a 'humanitarian pause', a meaningless and token gesture, the New Zealand Government has accepted that Israel is engaged in a legitimate war of self-defence. But while our 'political representatives' might be acting on the basis of a moral and ethics free realpolitik, those of us who have not left our humanity at the door understand that what we are witnessing in Gaza is genocide. International law refers to genocide as the 'intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and then the attempted destruction of that group. We are witnessing that now from a country that has been dropping leaflets over Gaza that read: 'Everyone who hasn’t evacuated from northern Gaza to the south might be treated as a member of a terrorist organisation. Your presence in Gaza valley increases your chances of death.'

In his support for a so-called 'humanitarian pause', Chris Hipkins quotes international law: 'Provision of essential support to innocent civilians was an obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention that must be upheld immediately' he declares.

But he seems to have missed the sections of the Geneva Convention that expressly prohibit collective punishment and the targeting of individuals. Our 'political representatives' have decided to turn a blind eye to Israel's failure to abide by international law. 

But the New Zealand Government has displayed no similar reluctance to charge Russia with committing war crimes in Ukraine. Said Nania Mahuta last year:

'Putin's war is actually creating not only significant war crimes and evidence of that but actually there's no word to describe the abhorrent images and descriptions of civilians that we have seen. There is, again, no shadow of a doubt, based on the images and descriptions that people are seeing reported from Ukraine, that there is enough there for the International Criminal Court to make its assessment and we support them to do that.'

But, as far as the New Zealand Government is concerned, Israel can continue its genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza and where the children write their names on their hands so that their bodies can be identified in the event they are killed by the Israeli military.