AFTER months of foot-dragging, David Lammy finally comes out with the obvious: Israel is breaking international law in Gaza.

The foreign secretary was referring to the Netanyahu government’s blockade of food, fuel and medicine, which he said was “starving children”, was “appalling and unacceptable” and “a breach of international law.”

This was in the Commons, just hours before Israel launched a new wave of bombing, killing a reported 400 civilians, including 170 children, in Gaza on the night of 17-18 March.

Scores of small human beings, many asleep in tents, ripped apart. An American surgeon volunteering at a hospital in southern Gaza tells the BBC: “One little boy had injuries to his heart, a cracked liver, an injury to his small bowel, his stomach and his colon. I’m sure he will die.”

The carnage continued in the days following. As have UK arms exports to Israel, weaponry which contributes to this new episode of killing.

David Lammy has gone off half-cock. He condemns a breach of international law while the government of which he is a senior member continues to sanction arms exports which help to ensure that very same breach continues virtually unchecked.

Last September, finally acknowledging that British weaponry risked being used in violation of international humanitarian law, the UK announced restrictions on arms sales to Israel. However, out of 350 export licences, a mere 30 were paused, thus allowing unfettered trading in parts for certain combat aircraft and for tanks, in addition to small arms and ammunition.

Sales include components for F-35 Israeli fighter-jets, whose bombs have decimated Gaza and routinely kill civilians.

Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth has been clear on Wales’s duty to speak out and has demanded international law be upheld through an arms embargo. Plaid must now double down in its protest over the slaughter of the innocent, always remembering that, even where protests don’t lead directly to change, the obligation to say what needs to be said is always unchallengeable.

With reignition of a humanitarian catastrophe two months into an agreed ceasefire, why is the Welsh government silent? Why, at the very least, hasn’t it uttered a whisper of protest - you know, about a breach of international humanitarian law, about the iniquities of the arms trade?

Eluned Morgan, is there anybody there? Don’t let the answer be no. Because internationalist Wales, which via preceding first ministers has proclaimed its solidarity with communities around the world, aimed at building a better world, will be maddened by the Gaza bloodbath.

ELUNED Morgan demonstrates again why she was a pretty hopeless Welsh health minister.

With Hywel Dda health board set on severely cutting back Bronglais Hospital’s stroke services, eradicating a dedicated and highly skilled multidisciplinary team providing hyper-acute and acute stroke-treatment, and stroke-rehabilitation, all she has to offer is complacency and platitudes.

Future stroke patients from Ceredigion, Powys and southern Gwynedd are currently threatened by the prospect of much of their treatment being carried out at huge distances from home - at Llanelli or Haverfordwest.

The first minister is duly questioned by the Cambrian News on why Bronglais should not be developed into a major stroke-treatment centre to counter the crushing inequality in prospect for Mid Wales patients.

Why indeed - if absolutely necessary on staffing or financial grounds - should a proportion of the resources now concentrated on three or four South Wales stroke-units not be reassigned to Bronglais?

The first minister sidesteps the question, chuntering on about specialist recruitment and Mid Wales patients needing to be prepared to travel (vast distances) for treatment.

It’s a non-response which feels like evidence she is in a tired and moss-covered mental rut. But then, which of her predecessors as health minister wasn’t?

Oh how we need fresh thinking and empathy directed at, just for once, taking Mid Wales hospital-level health-care seriously.

GREEN GEN Cymru’s pro-pylons propaganda is steeped in faked localism.

Its advertising is as a hidden persuader with cosy messages from an apparently selfless and solely community-focused well-wisher. It focuses on the energy company’s wish-list for windfarms near Llanddewi Brefi and at Nant Mithil, Radnor, both linked to a proposed new National Grid substation at Llandyfaelog, Carmarthenshire.

The whole scheme to be brought to life by a procession of towering steel pylons crashing their alien way through nearly 70 miles of some of Wales’s finest countryside. Rural beauty teeters on the brink of destruction.

Green GEN (GG) tells us it’s “working to develop a stronger, more resilient electricity network – distributing clean, green energy to our homes, hospitals, schools, businesses, and communities.”

Its scheme “will reduce pressure on the existing electricity grid, supporting green businesses and enabling green heating and the roll out of electric vehicles across rural Wales.”

All of which could be taken to infer that hospitals, schools, businesses and communities in west and mid Wales are currently in a febrile state of perpetual uncertainty about whether anything will happen when they flick a light-switch or go to turn on the immersion-heater.

This is rubbish. Our electricity supplies are well established, disrupted at worst by the odd winter storm. Green GEN seems interested in generating an energy-supply crisis which doesn’t exist.

Its website claims they are “acting now to build and operate a green energy network for Wales, that will make sure 100 per cent renewable energy can flow to our homes, hospitals, schools…” Yes, we’ve heard all that. And it’s highly misleading.

All GG actually propose doing is taking power from their, and perhaps others’, renewable energy-generation to a connection point on the Grid’s transmission system. The only thing this would mean is that power generated at Llanddewi Brefi and Nant Mithil would mix with the entire UK system’s electricity, which of course is far from being completely green.

Wales-generated energy would not be ring-fenced for Wales. It would simply be exported to the National Grid.

GG’s claim to be able to supply Wales with exclusively renewable energy turns out to be a transparent nonsense.