Tens of thousands protesting on every continent at Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza show the world is not taken in by Benjamin Netanyahu’s flimsy claims of self-defence.

The weekend saw the worst violence yet, with over 50 Palestinians killed in pre-dawn raids alone yesterday morning — including 18 members of a single extended family, the youngest a three-year-old girl.

That means nearly 200 Palestinians — over three-quarters of whom were civilians, according to the United Nations — have died since Israel launched wide-ranging air raids on the besieged enclave last Tuesday.

Hamas rockets fired back at Israel have, by contrast, killed no-one.

Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet revels in its power to kill where it pleases with total impunity, snubbing calls for a ceasefire or mediation not just from allies such as Germany but even from the United States, without whose vast financial backing and veto-power at the UN Tel Aviv would soon be held to account for its crimes.

The Israeli PM says casually that he “doesn’t know” how long the current bloodshed will continue but it “could be a long time.”

This studied indifference to the conflict clearly shows how little the attack is costing Israel. 

Its government and military chiefs intone that they will not cease their deadly campaign because armed resistance group Hamas has not stopped firing rockets.

This doesn’t hold water for a moment — if such was the case, offers of third-party mediation would have been welcomed.

In any case, the current spate of rocket attacks did not take place in a void, but as a response to a brutal Israeli police operation which saw hundreds of West Bank residents arrested and several killed during what was, officially, a hunt for three missing Israeli teenagers who were later found murdered.

It does not bother Netanyahu that Hamas denies involvement in these murders, although Israeli intelligence officials acknowledge the group does not usually hesitate to claim responsibility for violent acts.

Nor that the murders have, in fact, been admitted to by another organisation, a tiny local affiliate of the Isis terrorist movement currently butchering its way through Syria and Iraq.

The sudden, sweeping and now lethal clampdown on Hamas by Israel, with all its collateral damage of exterminated children and ruined lives, has nothing to do with the murdered teens.

Netanyahu’s motives may be mixed — partly a further bid to scupper efforts at Palestinian unity, as Ramzy Baroud suggests opposite, partly a bid to outdo fanatics in his Cabinet such as Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett who are even more bloodthirsty than he is.

But responsibility for the one-sided war now unfolding lies squarely with his government, which has done everything it can to prevent peace with Palestine — reacting with fury to Palestinian efforts to win UN recognition as a state, claiming it cannot negotiate with the Mahmoud Abbas administration because it “does not represent all of Palestine” when it did not represent Hamas, and then that it cannot because it “is backed by terrorists” when Hamas later gave it tentative backing.

Nor has Tel Aviv stopped its military occupation of Palestinian land or the expansion of illegal Jewish-only settlements on that land, the central facts which make endless war inevitable.

This is not to condone or justify the way Hamas targets Israeli civilians with its ineffective rocket strikes.

But that is no justification for Israeli aggression, any more than the appalling mass bombing of civilians by the US and British governments in World War II could remove blame from the German and Japanese regimes which started that war. Only a free and independent Palestine can bring peace to the Middle East.