The United States spearheaded a chorus of furious international condemnation of Israel yesterday, following the devastating overnight Israeli F-16 bombing of a Gaza City neighbourhood.
The air strike killed its target, the military commander of Hamas, but it also killed 14 Palestinians civilians, nine of them children, and injured more than 100.
The Palestinian Authority appealed to the United Nations Security Council for intervention and vowed to pursue a "war crimes" suit against Israel in the new International Criminal Court in The Hague. Calling the attack "ugly and despicable, a massacre," Mr Yasser Arafat said: "I ask the whole world, how they can stand silent and not stop these crimes?" A Hamas spokesman vowed to "kill their children like they killed ours."
The Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, hailed the elimination of Salah Shehade - a founder and the commander of the Hamas military wing which has carried out more suicide bombings than any other faction - as a "great success" while expressing regret over the loss of civilian lives. Israel had "no interest in harming civilians".
The Israeli army expressed sorrow for "any harm that befalls innocent people" and said it would not have carried out the raid if it had anticipated the consequences, but it blamed Shehade for using "civilians as a human shield."
Many Israeli politicians echoed the international critics, saying the planners ought to have realised the likely civilian death toll. "When you send an F-16 to blow up a block of flats, you have to know that there will be civilians hurt, children hurt," said Mr Yossi Sarid, leader of the opposition Meretz party. "Where else would they be in the middle of the night?"
Particularly ferocious criticism came from the Bush administration. Calling the attack "heavy-handed," a spokesman for President Bush flatly rejected comparisons, drawn by defensive Israeli spokesmen, with American raids in Afghanistan.
While the US had occasionally taken innocent lives "because of an errant bomb", the White House spokesman said, "this was a deliberate attack on the site, knowing that innocents would be lost."
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, said Israel had failed in its "legal and moral responsibility" to prevent loss of innocent life. The UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Mrs Mary Robinson, said the attack "violates international law". The EU said Israel could not achieve security by causing "indiscriminate civilian casualties".
Arab reaction was angrier still, even from the two states formally at peace with Israel. Jordan condemned a "savage Israeli assault" and Egypt urged the US to "stop such Israeli behaviour". The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al- Faisal, blamed Mr Sharon and demanded "severe punishment."
The raid came after midnight, without warning. A single F-16 dropped a single one-tonne bomb, Israel TV reported, directly hitting the building in which Shehade, his wife Leileh, their 14-year-old daughter Iman, and one of his deputies were sleeping, killing them all.
Eleven people were killed and dozens injured in adjacent blocks of flats. In utter pandemonium, bloodied children in their nightclothes were pulled out of the rubble and stretchered away by ambulance to hospital.
Relatives searched through the rubble-filled site, amid huge blocks of fallen concrete. A hospital list showed seven children aged from two months to five years among the dead. Haleema Matar said her children were among the victims. "If I died it would have been better," she said. "I would not have to see this."
An estimated 100,000 Gazans marched yesterday afternoon in funeral processions behind the bodies. A dead baby wrapped in a Palestinian flag was carried with its face exposed. Representatives of Mr Arafat's Fatah faction, the Islamic groups and other Palestinian splinter groups opposed to any reconciliation with Israel, all participated, their flags flying, masked men firing into the air, with the crowds vowing to avenge "the blood of the martyrs".
Israel last night went on military alert in fear of revenge attacks. Troops shot dead two armed Palestinians, members of Islamic Jihad, whom they intercepted on the edge of the Gaza Strip, in what the army said was an apparent attempt at a revenge raid on a kibbutz. Three more armed Palestinians, Hamas members wearing Israeli army uniforms, were killed in an exchange of fire outside Nablus.
Deaglán de Bréadún adds: the Minister for Foreign Affairs has expressed "shock" at the Israeli attack. While Ireland accepted the right of Israel to defend itself, Mr Cowen said, "the use of air-launched missiles in densely-populated areas can only result in civilian casualties on the scale we have seen. This kind of attack is not a reasoned or proportionate response to the threat of terrorism."