It may have been the Tories who’ve grabbed the headlines so far this week, with Suella Braveman out and David Cameron in, but tomorrow it could be Labour’s turn to implode.

As the sun sets on the day, Labour leader Sir Kier Starmer is tonight pondering whether or not to put Labour’s position on the Israel-Hams conflict to a vote tomorrow in an effort to maintain party unity.

Rumour has it that any Commons motion will stop short of calling for a ceasefire, but will express the party’s criticism of the war. Quite what this is intended to achieve only Sir Kier knows, but it won’t quell the growing rebellion in his party over Labour’s implied support for Israel’s punitive actions in Gaza.

Some 70 Labour MPs have already digressed from their party line, including 19 frontbench members, in calling for a ceasefire. Like many other political leaders, Starmer is of the view that any pullback in the current assault and bombardment will only give Hamas the opportunity to regroup and re-arm, and possibly commit a repeat of the dreadful attack of 7th October.

Instead, Mr Starmer – who is a lawyer both by training and political strategy – has pinned his hopes on a ‘humanitarian pause’ which, rather than an actual ceasefire, is like everyone having a couple of days (or possibly even just hours) off from the carnage to get food, water and supplies in, and the most severely injured civilians out – and then everything kicks of again. Or at least that’s how more than a third of his MPs now see it.

To be fair to Mr Starmer, this is only a reflection of the UK, US and EU view that Israel must be allowed to rip through Gaza to complete whatever retribution it feels appropriate – and the annihilation of the civilian population, whilst very regrettable, is in the nature of war and collateral damage.

Quite how a British Labour has arrived at this philosophic position is a mystery, given the party’s predominantly pacifist and mediatory history, but these are the political days we’re living through. Over the weekend human rights group Amnesty International also waded in, accusing the Labour leader of failing to show “the clear and principled leadership that this decades-old crisis needs”, and this is the ambiguity now threatening to tear his party apart.

When Hamas struck on 7th October, at least 1,400 people were butchered and 224 were taken hostage. Whilst figures from a war zone should always be treated with caution, it’s estimated that 11,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel retaliated (one month ago) and the country’s infrastructure is in total collapse – which by any account is a very questionable interpretation of proportionality, a key condition of the ethics of modern warfare.

That said, it should be pointed out that the 7th October attack, whilst horrendous, cannot be used in International Humanitarian Law as justification for what is happening now, as the war currently raging has its root causes in much earlier events. Whilst it will be extremely difficult for Israelis in particular to get past 7th October, any dialogue about a future peace and resolution will need all involved to step back from the recent bloodshed and destruction being carried out by both sides.

Unfortunately the questionable position of western governments on the destruction of Gaza is going to make it all but impossible for the UK and its allies to take any meaningful part in conflict resolution talks, having come down so firmly on one side of the conflict.

As it happens the only world leader who has consistently called for a ceasefire and for sanity to prevail is Pope Francis. At his Angelus on Sunday Francis underscored his closeness to all those suffering, Palestinians and Israelis. He said he remembers and prays for them every day, and he offers them his “embrace” at “this dark moment.”

And he then made this impassioned plea:

“May the weapons be stopped: they will never lead to peace, and may the conflict not widen! Enough! Enough, brothers! In Gaza, let the wounded be rescued immediately, let civilians be protected, let far more humanitarian aid be allowed to reach that stricken population. May the hostages be freed, including the elderly and children. Every human being, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, of any people or religion, every human being is sacred, is precious in the eyes of God and has the right to live in peace. Let us not lose hope: let us pray and work tirelessly so that the sense of humanity may prevail over hardness of heart.”

Again, just yesterday, in a letter ahead of the 38th diocesan world youth day (which will be celebrated on 26th November) he notes that we are living in a period of crisis, of war, when “for many people, including the young, hope seems absent.”

Many, he says, “feel as if they are in a dark prison, where the light of the sun cannot enter.”

In such situations, Pope Francis asks, “How can we experience the joy and hope of which Saint Paul speaks? When we think of human tragedies, especially the suffering of the innocent, we too can echo some of the Psalms and ask the Lord, ‘Why?’”

In truth, much of the “why” is because world leaders have long since seemed to suffer from an inexplicable reluctance to say the obvious when it comes to global conflict. Inexplicable, that is until one understands how warfare and the decimation of countries has become the most lucrative of income streams for many developed countries, and especially the UK.

Pope Francis has regularly been a vocal critic of the global arms trade. On the papal flight back from Africa in February he called it “the biggest plague” affecting the world today.  He added that “it is also true that the violence is provoked” by the ready supply of weapons and that making it easier for people to kill each other just to make money “is diabolical — I have no other word for it.”

Looking each day at the terrible destruction of Gaza the connection to the wider arms trade might not seem obvious, but both sides have ready access, and are welcome customers of, the shadowy figures at the heart of a global industry that really ought to have no place in a modern society.

Since 2015 when deals were first struck, the UK has approved millions of pounds’ worth of licences for military equipment to Israeli forces, including components for F-35 fighter jets, which can deliver ground strikes and have been recently pictured in social media posts from the Israeli Air Force. For its part Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, acquires smuggled weapons from Iran and also builds them in Gaza, according to the CIA – though it’s also rumoured that many of these weapons, or at least their components, come from the UK and its allies.

Given that we have a lead from Pope Francis, the UK Catholic community ought to be far more vocal in its condemnation of arms production but – like our legislators ­– we also have compromises to deal with. Thankfully the Church itself has long since divested from the arms trade but many thousands of UK Catholics depend upon defence and ancillary jobs for their livelihoods. The last time this relationship was scrutinised was back in the 1990s, when British Aerospace, and in particular its Wharton, Lancashire plant was manufacturing and supplying Hawk jets to the Indonesian military, who were engaged in a brutal campaign to annihilate the (prominently Catholic) East Timorese, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,00 civilians. Numerous pacifist and other lobby groups campaigned to get the UK government to halt the sales, and the Catholic Church was also prominent in voicing its concerns.

Such confrontations seem to have faded with the decades, and these days we tend to restrict our interventions to calls for prayer and peace, when a more direct demands for people to stop killing each other and manufacturing lethal weapons and munitions could carry significant political weight – something Pope Francis clearly understands.

In 2003, as UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was swinging the country behind the US-led invasion of Iraq, Pope John Paul II used his State of the World address to try and prevent the invasion, declaring: “No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.” He then put his Pro-Nuncio to the US on the next plane to Washington to intercede directly with George W. Bush. The invasion went ahead with all the disastrous consequences we know about, but at least the pope had tried, and the world knew the Catholic position.

Back in Gaza, the killing and the destruction goes on, while the world sits and watches and politicians make their excuses. Please God there will be some forgiveness for our inaction.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic publisher and theologian