THE Church of Scotland’s welcome gesture of support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement could not be more timely.

The butchery being unleashed on the trapped inhabitants of Gaza — with the Palestinian death toll from a week of murderous bombardment approaching 250 — illustrates that Israel has free rein to commit war crimes in the Strip.

The hypocrisy of its leaders is staggering — with President Shimon Peres issuing a feeble apology for Wednesday’s slaughter of four children playing football on a beach, claiming it was “unintentional.”

Israel’s “investigation” into the deaths of the boys — the youngest nine years old, the eldest 11 — has found that the target was supposed to be “Hamas terrorists.”

We will probably never know whether this was cold-blooded child murder or “collateral damage.” It will make no difference to the boys’ parents.

Nor to the Israeli army, which seldom bothers to hold its troops to account for deliberate killing and has made “accidental” deaths inevitable by heavily bombing civilian targets in defiance of international law.

Perhaps the sickest irony of all is issuing warnings to tens of thousands of Gaza residents to leave before bombardment begins — for where? Gaza, unlike Israel, does not have sophisticated bomb shelters. And the entire Strip is under siege, with Israel and Egypt imprisoning its one-and-a-half million people in the tiny territory. They cannot get out.

Such is the disparity between Hamas’s ramshackle rockets and Israel’s state-of-the-art war machine that even lily-livered Tory sidekick Nick Clegg now calls Tel Aviv’s action “disproportionate.”

Clegg is wrong — because such language buys the Israeli narrative that it is responding to Hamas attacks. It is not.

The carnage in Gaza is part and parcel of a situation engineered by Israel in order to disorient forces legitimately resisting its colonisation programme — which the West is complicit in, since despite periodic pro forma protests at settlement expansion no effort is ever made to make the settler state pay.

This is why the BDS movement is so important — only when Israel begins to feel economic pain for repeatedly flouting international law will it be forced to open serious negotiations with Palestine’s representatives on formulating a just and lasting peace.

Call time on Ukraine

UKRAINE’S claim that Russia is responsible for shooting down one of its warplanes cannot be verified.

Based on previous dodgy claims from the fascist-backed government in Kiev we should take the accusation with a pinch of salt — even Western military experts say the regime consistently underrates the capacity of rebels to fight back against its onslaught.

Blaming Russia is a dangerous game — presumably an attempt to drag in additional help from Kiev’s US and EU cheerleaders. The increasing violence on the border could result in a more general war and an even higher death toll.

But we must be under no illusions as to the nature of the tragedy being played out in eastern Ukraine.

Rebel armed forces formed in response to the overthrow of the country’s elected government. 

After the new authorities made moves to ban the Russian language and the Communist Party and unleashed neonazi paramilitaries on trade unionists and socialists, the east’s initial demands for autonomy turned into a life-or-death struggle to avoid being crushed by the far-right.

Revelations this week have proved that pro-Kiev militias such as the Azov Battalion have become a magnet for white supremacist militants from a range of countries, openly declaring war on communists and ethnic minorities.

Battalion commander Andriy Biletsky has vowed to “punish severely sexual perversions and any interracial contacts that lead to the extinction of the white man.”

The people of eastern Ukraine are fighting fascism. All progressives must stand by them in that fight.