We write to condemn the Guardian’s decision to print a wildly inaccurate and inflammatory advert from supporters of the state of Israel branding the Palestinian resistance as “child killers”. This is especially sickening when Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza has killed close to 400 Palestinian children. Amnesty International has condemned the deliberate targeting of schools and hospitals by Israel as a war crime.

Among the advert’s very many inaccuracies is the claim that those forces opposing Israel do not have the support of Palestinians, when the current Israeli offensive is against a united Hamas-Fatah government which commands the support of the majority of Palestinians.

Sadly, the decision to print this advert, rejected by the Times newspaper, is another sign of the increasingly pro-Israeli bias of the Guardian’s editorial policy, including the gross underestimate of the size of last Saturday’s Gaza protest demonstration. You are repeatedly running the slur that those who campaign in support of Palestine are antisemitic when the very many Jews in the movement, and the movement as a whole, have repeatedly made it absolutely clear that this is not the case.

We call on the editor to redress the balance in future coverage.

John Rees Co-founder, Stop the War Coalition

Lindsey German Convenor, Stop the War Coalition

Jeremy Corbyn MP

Sarah Colborne Director, Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Kate Hudson General secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

David Hearst Middle East Eye

Tariq Ali Writer and broadcaster

Barnaby Raine Organiser of the Jewish Bloc on demonstrations for Gaza

• The advertisement you carry today by This World: The Values Network accuses Hamas of using children as a human shield. This is a highly contentious accusation which has been widely refuted, but in this advert this accusation, for which there is no evidence, appears to be compared with the activities of Nazi Germany (“I have seen Jewish children thrown into the fire”).

It then goes on to call Hamas “worshippers of a death cult”. In the interests of Israeli propaganda, this seems to me to be simply an attempt to draw attention away from the real situation in Palestine and set up a spurious distraction from the central issue and motivation for opposition to Israel: dispossession, persecution and illegal occupation of Palestine by Israel.

You presumably invoke free speech to accept this advert. However, I would be interested to know whether you would accept a similar advertisement from a pro-Palestinian organisation comparing the behaviour of Israel with that of Nazi Germany. I suspect not. Would you still invoke the free speech argument or would you recognise that accepting for publication this type of propaganda in the context of the situation in Palestine is reprehensible?

Lorie Harding

Swanage, Dorset

• My once dear Guardian, I have just learnt that despite the Times refusing to run this advertisement, the Guardian has. As a regular reader – I buy the paper from my local newsagent every day, weekends included – I am appalled by your decision to run this inflammatory and blatantly racist ad. There is absolutely no evidence to support the claims and the fact that a newspaper such as yours in willing to allow this racist propaganda frankly baffles me. After 25 years buying your newspaper daily, I will no longer be purchasing my daily copy.

Nigel Osborne

London

• I have not signed Stop the War Coalition’s open letter to the Guardian, condemning your decision to accept a full-page advert seeking to justify Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but this doesn’t mean that I am any less appalled at your decision. The only reason that I haven’t signed Stop the War’s letter is that it chose to make its central point the issue of whether or not Hamas has the support of the Palestinian people. To my mind this is irrelevant, since Israeli war crimes would still be war crimes whomever a majority of Palestinians supported and many of Israel’s victims have been too young to support anyone, anyway.

Malcolm Hunter

Leicester

• I have never seen a political advertisement as mendacious as that which appeared above the photograph of Elie Wiesel in the Guardian today. Nor one more certain to effect the opposite of what it hopes to achieve.

Malcolm Pittock

Bolton, Lancashire