An appeal for an abandoned people subjected to collective punishment by genocidal, American backed Israeli government

Since Hamas and other Gaza militants seized the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, and killed two of his comrades in late June, shells, drones and machine gun-fire from Israeli forces have killed some 400 Palestinians, civilians, women and children among them, in an operation Israel stated was to free Cpl Shalit and stop the Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza.

For five long months, electricity was cut to eight hours a day, damaging water supplies, after a surgically accurate bombing condemned by Israelis as well as foreign human rights groups as collective punishment in breach of humanitarian law.

Reaching a peak in July, the use of sonic booms, often deliberately timed as children were going to school, created misery and fear. As if that was not enough, a far lower but significant number of civilians, also including children, have been killed or wounded in the sporadic fighting between Fatah and Hamas, the two dominant factions in Palestinian politics, or in clan battles.

For the immediate survivors of the Israeli shells that killed 17 members of the Athamneh family as they tried to flee their home in Beit Hanoun as it was attacked, the bereavement is, if anything, harder to bear now that more than three weeks have elapsed since it happened. In late afternoon sunshine on Sunday, in the now eerily peaceful alley where the carnage was perpetrated, Hayat Athamneh, 56, a strong woman who lost three adult sons, all fathers themselves, sat with their still devastated and injured brother Amjad, 31, and his wife, who lost their own son Mahmoud, 10. "Now I feel it," said Hayat, covering her eyes as they fill with tears. " It wasn't so bad at the beginning. There were a lot of people around. Now there is nobody."