Pampered hernia patient Netanyahu is ultimately responsible for the destruction of more of the planets hospitals than anyone since the bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War.

Normally, one would feel at least some, if not in fact quite a lot, of sympathy, for a gentleman of a certain age who has to go to hospital to have a hernia operation.

A rumbling hernia can be very annoying, sometimes to the point of public irascibility and irrationality in the victim who feels that hot poker protruding where it should not be.

Fortunately, hernia repair is one of the commonest operations performed by surgeons and hence, through sheer practitioner repetition, is one of the safest procedures in large and well equipped hospitals.

Should the fate befall a serving Israeli Prime Minister, he will have the benefit of the world class facilities and surgeons in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Centre.

Benjamin Netanyahus stay there resulted in successful repair of his hernia under a general anaesthetic.

No doubt, the operating theatre was 100% sterile, the surgeons and theatre nurses thoroughly scrubbed, masked and gowned, the anaesthesia pitch perfect, the private ward equipped with a comfortable automated bed and clean linen, changed daily, the bathroom and towels thoroughly hygienic, and the food plentiful, regular and nutritious. I dont know if silk pyjamas were available but there are no reports that Netanyahu left hospital with any bed rash.

Is there not some grotesque irony here, a display of the deepest hypocrisy, a flaunting of a monstrous incongruity, a demonstration of a moral compass without a needle let alone a north?

Irony is often thought of as a figure of speech or a literary device, but here it is a revelation of the moral bankruptcy of a nation, and the self-serving vacuity of a man.

Surely it is unique, industrial scale, irony that pampered hernia patient Netanyahu is ultimately responsible for the destruction of more of the planets hospitals than anyone since the bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War.

In Gaza, operating theatres are in ruins, and sterilisation of surgical equipment is all but impossible.

There is no surgical equipment to sterilise. There is even a premium on soap and water.

Hundreds of health workers have been killed or maimed in hospital bomb blasts and shootings.

Child amputations have been conducted with inadequate anaesthesia sometimes, reportedly, with none.

The oxygen, insulin, puffers, and anti-coagulants needed by thousands with lung diseases, diabetes, asthma and blood clots, have long since become as precious as diamonds.

Opioids for cancer patients or the terminally ill dont exist.

Supplies of needles, sutures, swabs, and dressings, let alone medications, for those who have been, and still are being, grievously injured in Gaza are miniscule.

Doctors cant find antibiotics or analgesics any more than people can find food and water for their starving children.

Skin and respiratory infections are rife, especially among children. Ointments and salves dont exist.

Babies with diarrhoea are wrapped in rags not nappies. Pregnant women give birth on the floors of shattered wards.

Many people still wear the clothes they stood up in on 7 October 2023. Washing machines and detergent are as scarce as petrol.

With more than 100,000 dead or injured, one could safely assume that no hernia operations like Netanyahus have been performed in Gaza in the past 6 months, nor will be performed in the next 6, or even in the foreseeable future.

When, in the face of the horrors it has unleashed, will the political leaders in the US, Europe, the UK, Canada, and Australia, acquire the moral conscience and courage to see and to say that Israel in its current incarnation and under its present leadership, is a failed and disreputable nation no less than Iran or Syria, and that pro-active measures must be taken to induce or enforce a cease fire?

Not soon. The international hypocrisy, based so obviously on the white racism that sustained apartheid South Africa for so long, sustains and encourages Israel to go on doing what its doing in Gaza.

Those around Joe Biden, whose administration funds and arms Israel to destroy hospitals, must be hoping and praying that he doesnt succumb to a hernia or worse that requires a spell in Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington, the venue of choice for presidential ailments.

There, the facilities for Presidents might even put those for Israeli Prime Ministers in a slight shadow.

But then again, the intergalactic quality of the irony that should generate would just as surely and as quickly pass far over the heads of all concerned.