AFP

THE weeping of Ahmad Samouni was heart-rending. From a hospital bed in Gaza, the 16-year-old broke into tears as he told a television interviewer how several members of his family had been killed in an Israeli strike. “My brother was bleeding so much and right in front of my eyes, he died. My other brother Ismail, he also bled to death. My mum and my youngest brother, they are gone. Four brothers and my mother, dead. May God give them peace.”

The plight of the Samouni clan stands out even amid the profligate bloodshed of Israel's war in the Gaza Strip. According to survivors, about 100 members of the clan had been gathered by Israeli soldiers in a building in the Zeitun district on January 4th. The next day, it was struck by Israeli shells or missiles, killing about 30. Worse, Israeli forces are accused of preventing Palestinian paramedics from helping the survivors for two days.

“This is a shocking incident. The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded,” said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), not usually given to emotive language or public complaints about violations of humanitarian law. Navi Pillay, the United Nations' High Commissioner for Human Rights, went further. The killings show “elements of what would constitute war crimes”, she said.

Israel replies that its army has looked into the claims and found no record of the incident at Zeitun. It claims that it is targeting Hamas only, and promises to improve “co-operation and co-ordination” with the ICRC. But Israel is vague about whether it will conduct a further inquiry, and tends to be wary of outside investigation. It declined to co-operate, for instance, with a UN inquiry into a shelling incident that killed 19 civilians in Gaza in 2006. This concluded that “there is a possibility that the shelling…constituted a war crime”.

Another contentious incident in this war was the killing of more than 40 bystanders on January 6th near a UN school that was temporarily housing refugees. Here the Israeli army says that its soldiers were attacked by mortars fired “from within the school” and responded with mortar fire. But the UN strenuously denies that Hamas fighters were in the school. There is also the alleged use of white phosphorous shells: permitted as a smokescreen, but not over civilian areas.

About 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, among them more than 400 women and children, in nearly three weeks of fighting. But Hugo Slim, author of “Killing Civilians”, a book on the suffering of civilians in war, argues that although every civilian death is a tragedy, “not every civilian death is a crime”. War crimes typically involve deliberate brutality or recklessness. The modern laws of conflict do not seek to ban war, or even to eliminate the killing of civilians; they merely seek to stop the most egregious abuses and to limit harm to civilians as far as possible.

Short of arguing that Israel is deliberately massacring Palestinians (if so, many more would probably have been killed and Israel's warning leaflets would be superfluous), judging war crimes depends on the facts of specific incidents and subjective legal concepts. Is Israel discriminating between civilians and combatants? Are its actions proportionate to the military gain? And is it taking proper care to spare civilians in the crowded Strip?

A British government manual on the laws of war admits that, for example, the principle of proportionality “is not always straightforward”, not least because attempting to reduce the danger to civilians may increase the risk to one's own forces. Moreover, if the enemy puts civilians at risk by deliberately placing military targets near them, “this is a factor to be taken into account in favour of the attackers”.

Israel makes precisely such arguments. Its aggressive tactics, it says, are justified by the need to protect Israeli forces, and Hamas is to blame for civilian deaths by hiding rockets and other weapons in mosques. According to Israeli officials, Hamas's top leaders are hiding in a bunker under the overstretched Shifa hospital (which, however, has not been attacked).

The laws of war have their roots, in part, in early worries about the impact of military technology such as air bombardment and poison gases. But international law has found it easier to deal with low-tech mass killings at close quarters, as in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, than with the rights and wrongs of Western-style air campaigns. Civilians are repeatedly hit by NATO aircraft in Afghanistan, but there are only regrets, not court-martials.

In other ways, military technology has raised the bar for what is considered acceptable. The skies above Gaza are buzzing with surveillance drones. Israeli command-and-control systems are doubtless as sophisticated as American ones, which give commanders vast digital maps in which structures are individually numbered and clearly identified if they are not to be attacked; they even have “splat” graphics to estimate the area that will be affected by a blast. Mishaps do happen; on January 5th three Israeli soldiers were killed by one of their own tanks. But without more facts, it is hard to believe the Israelis did not know about the presence of civilians at Zeitun and at the UN school.