Palestinians in Gaza continued to bury their dead last week. Even by the bloody standards associated with this beleaguered and bitterly contested strip of land, the last seven weeks of violence have taken a heavy toll.

Since early April, weekly ‘Great March of Return’ demonstrations have focused on the plight of 700,000 Palestinian refugees, driven from their homeland in 1948.

But in highlighting that plight, today’s Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have paid another terrible price.

According to UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, Israeli forces have now killed 106 Palestinians, including 15 children, since March 30. More than 12,000 have also been wounded, at least 3,500 by live ammunition.

The stark reality of the casualty figures speaks for itself, as do the events that near daily now play out on the ground.

Armed with state-of-the-art sniper rifles, Israeli troops on the Gaza border have picked off demonstrators, holding flags, slingshots and incendiary kites. Those protesters burning tyres or wearing improvised gas masks against the Israeli tear gas canisters that rain down are also marked out as targets.

Journalists too, wearing body armour and helmets though clearly identified as Press, are equally fair game for Israeli marksmen.

The death toll largely from sniper fire by the Israeli army comes as new UK government data shows that Britain has approved the sale of arms to Israel worth £320 million since the 2014 Gaza war.

These include components for drones, combat aircraft and helicopters, along with spare parts for sniper rifles, according to the UK-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) that works towards the abolition of the international sale of weapons.

Andrew Smith, a spokesman for CAAT, says: “There is little doubt that UK equipment has been used against the people of Gaza time and again, but that hasn't stopped successive governments from licensing even more arms to the Israeli military.

“By continuing to arm Israeli forces the UK isn’t just making itself complicit in future attacks, it is sending a message of support for the collective punishment that has been inflicted.”

Once again the wanton indiscriminate killing by the Israeli military over the past weeks has stirred up global outrage. Once again human rights activists are asking, how many times have we been here before and is the moment not long overdue for concerted international action to hold Israel to account?

Certainly the UN Human Rights Council thinks so. On Friday it voted to set up a probe into the recent killings in Gaza, accusing Israel of using excessive force and calling Israel’s reaction to the protests “wholly disproportionate”.

“There is little evidence of any attempt to minimise casualties on Monday,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein told a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, speaking about one of the most costly and violent days in the protests.

The human rights chief went on to tell the meeting that Gazans were effectively “caged in a toxic slum” and that Gaza’s occupation by Israel had to end. For those Palestinians caged in that slum, living conditions have become desperate.

On average there is only five hours of electricity per day, dwindling supplies of food and medicine, staggeringly high unemployment - 45% overall, and 60% among young people. There are also rising levels of water pollution with some 90% of supplies contaminated.

Some countries though, Britain among them, remain seemingly blind to such appalling conditions and deaf to the remarks of the UN human rights chief, insisting instead in refusing to back the new UN resolution.

In all the UN move to send a commission of inquiry to investigate the killings and Israeli action was backed by 29 members of the 47-state UN forum. The United States and Australia however rejected the resolution, while Britain was among another 14 countries including Germany and Japan that abstained.

The UK’s double standards on selling arms to Israel and abstaining from Friday’s UN resolution vote are even more crass given Foreign Office warnings in its most recent annual ‘Human Rights Priority Country Status Report’ that Israel’s occupation policies continue to violate the “human rights of Palestinians”.

Despite this, the latest arms export data released by the UK’s Department of International Trade (DIT) show that arms export licences to Israel soared to £216m, last year from £20m in the wake of the Gaza war in 2014.

At that time, there were renewed calls for a halt to arms sales with a debate in government about UK weapons going to Israel, with Baroness Warsi resigning in opposition to the continued arms sales.

A review by government subsequently found 12 licences for arms supplies that are likely to have been used in the 2014 war in which 2,200 Palestinians and 76 Israelis were killed. Despite UK government assurances that all arms exports licenses would be reviewed, all restrictions on weapons sales to Israel were finally dropped in 2015.

Since then the online news portal Middle East Eye (MEE) says it understands the government has made no assessment of whether UK weapons have been used in the Occupied Territories, and arms licences have again spiked.

The most recent DIT data, however, shows the latest arms sales include a major £183m licence covering “technology for military radars”.

More significantly in light of the past week's events in Gaza, UK ministers have also approved the sale for export of grenades, bombs, missiles, armoured vehicles, assault rifles, small arms ammunition, sniper rifles and components for sniper rifles.

With the value of arms approvals to Israel more than doubling last year after £84m in sales in 2016, campaigners warn that there is “little doubt” that UK-made weapons have been used in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, says MEE.

The DIT data will raise fresh concerns that British-made weapons are being used by the Israeli military in operations and that components in sniper rifles such as targeting scopes may have been used to kill scores of Palestinian civilians in Gaza over the past few weeks.

“The situation is desperate, and the UK should be working for a peaceful and just solution, not pushing arms sales which can be used in abuses for years to come,” added Andrew Smith of CAAT.

Over and above the controversy surrounding UK arms sales, the Gaza killings have also once again raised questions over the Israeli military’s rules of engagement and whether war crimes have been committed.

The disparity in casualties along with photographs and videos showing Israeli forces firing on protesters, paramedics and journalists who pose little or no conceivable danger, also speak for themselves say some human right activists.

Israel meanwhile claims it soldiers were acting in self-defence and were under orders to prevent protesters breaching the Gaza border.

Just a few days ago in an article exploring the issue of whether Israeli forces were engaging in war crimes or were acting in self-defence, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, cited legal experts who concluded that such an assessment depends on how the situation at the Gaza border is defined. Do the laws of human rights or the laws of war apply in this often violent, cross border situation, the newspaper asked?

According to prominent Israeli human right lawyer, Michael Sfard the laws of war do not apply and that if the laws of human rights are to apply instead, then the Israeli army has clearly violated them, Haaretz quoted him as saying.

His views are shared by Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which believes that the protests in Gaza, as violent as they are, should be treated as a public assembly and therefore, subject to law enforcement rules rather than the rules of armed conflict.

Sfard is one of several lawyers representing a group of human rights organisations based in Israel and the Gaza Strip that have petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice against the army’s rules of engagement, claiming they violate international law.

These organisations have also demanded that the army make public the detailed list of engagement rules, which to date have been classified.

Through research using everything from documented Tweets to interviews with members of the Israeli defence establishment, the group of human rights organisations of which Sfard is part, has been able to confirm that soldiers have permission to fire on protesters breaching the border fence, even if they are unarmed and pose no imminent danger.

There is also authorisation to use live fire against what are described as ‘key agitators,’ even if these ‘key agitators’ are not endangering any lives.

“The state and army argue that the use of potentially lethal force against unarmed civilians is permitted even in circumstances where they do not impose an imminent danger to the lives of others,” Sfardt says.

“It seems to me that the huge number of casualties we have seen in recent weeks is a direct result of this legal thesis, which is completely baseless. It contradicts the most fundamental principles of laws governing the use of force, which adhere to the formula that endangering the lives of civilians can only be done to defend life – and nothing else,” he concluded.

In recent weeks Amnesty International documented “eyewitness testimonies, video and photographic evidence suggesting that many Palestinians were deliberately killed or injured while posing no immediate threat to the Israeli soldiers”.

In most of the fatal cases analysed by Amnesty International prior to last Monday’s killings, “victims were shot in the upper body, including the head and the chest, some from behind.”

Canadian emergency doctor Tarek Loubani says he was shot in the leg when everything was quiet around him: “No burning tyres, no smoke, no tear gas, nobody messing around in front of the buffer zone. Just a clearly marked medical team well away from everybody else.”

An hour later, a paramedic who was part of his team, and who had rescued Loubani, was himself shot and killed, the doctor explained.

More often than not those killed or wounded were hit by Israeli snipers some of whom were armed with American-made Remington M24 sniper rifles, which are sometimes sold in the United States as a hunting rifle to kill deer.

For its part the Israelis authorities in seeking to deflect the ongoing calls for accountability over the killings have been pushing a video clip in which Hamas official Salah Albardaweel claims 50 of those Palestinians killed last Monday belonged to the Islamist group Hamas.

But as international law experts and human rights officials have stressed, the political affiliation of those killed is irrelevant when it comes to the legality of Israel’s actions.

“There hasn’t been widespread condemnation by Israelis as the mainstream political echelon is not concerned about the way things have deteriorated. This is thanks to a decade-long intensive (process of) dehumanising Gaza residents by the Israeli government. So now Israelis see all Gazans as terrorists and not people,” the lawyer was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying.

“After such a long period with no genuine contact,” Sfart concluded, “the only information Israelis get is vicious, often racist and unfair. This has created an intense apathy for the plight of the Palestinian people.”

While that apathy within Israel continues, UK arms sales to the country and its armed forces soar. Speaking last week to MEE, Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, called Britain’s duplicitous position on selling weaponry to Israel an “outrage”. In light of the terrible toll in Gaza these past weeks, few would find it hard to disagree.