“Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere,” Oscar Wilde wrote.
The UN is in no doubt Israel has crossed that line with its 11-week blockade on Gaza.
It warned Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that around 14,000 infants would die within the next 24 hours unless they are given food and medical aid.
Tel Aviv is at risk of breaching international humanitarian law, France the UK and Canada have warned, by withholding aid.
People are now reduced to eating rotten food and drinking filthy water. Aid workers are claiming that malnutrition similar to that seen during the Ethiopian famine is now common among Gazan children.
With the Israeli offensive intensifying, and hundreds more killed in the past few days, hospitals have run out of dressings and medicines.
The relentless blitz has created diabolical conditions where the lives of thousands of civilians including women and children are being senselessly lost.
The US writer Kate Douglas Wiggin said: “Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.”
But it is not necessary to believe in God to feel a sense of outrage that the preventable deaths of so many blameless victims are being allowed go unchallenged.
Despite the unprecedented suffering, Mr Netanyahu has vowed he was “taking control of all of Gaza” and an Israeli military spokesperson ominously said there was “no end date necessarily” to their new expanded, ferocious offensive.
Mr Netanyahu is intent as ever on subjugating Palestine, with plans to annex the West Bank and permanently occupy Gaza, flattening its remaining buildings and relocating its two million residents.
A sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby
London, Ottawa and Paris have said that Operation Gideon’s Chariots, the name Israel has given to this new bombardment, could be breaching the law.
“We have always supported Israel’s right to defend Israelis against terrorism. But this escalation is wholly disproportionate,” the three Western leaders said in a joint missive, adding that they cannot stand by while Mr Netanyahu pursues “these egregious actions”.
Even US president Donald Trump, Israel’s closest ally, snubbed him during his trip to the Middle East last week, when he chose not to drop in to Israel.
There is some sense of unease in Tel Aviv, with opposition party leader Yair Golan of the Democrats warning Israel’s conduct in Gaza risks putting it on a path to becoming a “pariah state”.
He said “a sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population”.
Restoring reverence for life and respect for the right for a state to exist is in Israel’s long-term best interests as much as anyone else’s.
Mr Trump regularly credits himself with being a peacemaker, yet sees no contradiction in the authorising of billions of dollars in weapons deliveries to Israel, including 2,000-pound bombs the Biden administration delayed due to concern about civilian casualties.
As the world’s most powerful leader, he has a humanitarian responsibility to help end the carnage.