"You're shooting at kids, don't you understand that?"

War is the enabler of humanity's darkest instincts; a force of nature that cruelly exposes the depths to which we're capable of sinking. But occasionally, it allows us a glimpse of the best of humanity as well; its challenges met by the bravery of at least some of us.

The footage above, from Korean television, shows Palestinians on the West Bank demonstrating against the assault on Gaza clashing with Israeli troops. The heroic young woman who stands between the Israeli guns and the Palestinians - imploring "you're shooting at kids, don't you understand that?" - is Huweida Arraf, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement. Her actions are reminiscent of those of the unknown Chinese man who placed himself in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, 1989.

For every Israeli soldier, Hamas miliant, armchair apologist for Israeli massacres or international statesperson working to block a ceasefire until Israel has achieved its military objectives, there's an aid worker, an ISM volunteer, a person documenting abuses for a human rights organisation, an Israeli who refused to fight with the IDF on moral grounds, and activist, a protester, and so on and so on. Even war offers no excuse for cynicism, provided we're prepared to look squarely at the whole picture. The correct response to the bloodletting of the past fortnight is not cynicism about our fellow human beings but a question, "what am I doing to help?"

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Amnesty International now says explicitly that the Israeli military is targeting civilians:

"..civilians – particularly the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza – continue to both be targeted and suffer disproportionately in this conflict".

Remember that generous daily three-hour ceasefire that Israel is introducing, so that the Palestinians can get "whatever they need"? Save the Children says its "completely inadequate". Such ingratitude. I mean, what's Israel got to do? Stop killing innocent people for the other 21 hours in the day as well?

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Wednesday evening, the Telegraph reported:

"Growing evidence emerged today of the bloodiest single incident of the Gaza conflict when around 70 corpses were found by a Palestinian paramedic near a bombed-out house. Concerns had been growing that Zeitoun had witnessed massive civilian casualties after surviving members of the Samouni clan reached Gaza City three days ago."

"They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday. "

"At 6.35am on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life."

"Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting."

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has more on this.

A press release from the International Committee of the Red Cross begins:

"On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling."

"The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israel Defense Forces during the afternoon of 7 January. "

"The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. "

"They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses. "

"In another house, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israel Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks. "

""This is a shocking incident," said Pierre Wettach, the ICRC's head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.""

The US ambassador to the UN told the media this week that absolutely no "equivalence" could be drawn between the Israeli military and Hamas. I agree. Whether Hamas wanted to or not, it simply does not have the means to cause anything remotely like the bloodbath we have seen over the past fortnight in the Gaza strip. Israelis have never suffered at the hands of Palestinian groups anything resembling the horrors we are witnessing now. Overall, in the eight years since the second intifada began, 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians. Israel has killed more than three quarters that number of Palestinians in just under two weeks. 5,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israel between September 2000 and November 2008 - that number has been swelled by 15 per cent less than a fortnight. In fact, given that Israel is preventing both medics and journalists from properly accessing Gaza, the currently cited death toll of 770 may be a serious underestimate.

So yes, there is no "equivalence".

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The above three stories come via Jamie Stern-Weiner's blog The Heathlander, which has been very impressive over the last two weeks in compiling information and analysis on the attack on Gaza. Bookmark it and visit often. Another good source is Middle East historian, Juan Cole.

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At TheRealNews, Phyllis Bennis, a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC., gives a good, clear assessment of a number of important factors: the background to current events, the US role, the legal status of Israel's actions and the problems faced by the United Nations in bringing the crisis to an end.

More from me soon