Gaza's estimated 700,000 children under the age of 15 are hostages. There is no other word.
Jan Egeland, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator via BBC News: "We are appalled by seeing how they're playing with the future of defenceless civilians, including children."
To their credit, many Israelis are as appalled as I am by the conduct of their government in the current offensive which targeted civilian infranstructure on the first day. Israeli human rights advocates are protesting, and urging compliance with the Geneva Conventions.
The Independent: The Israeli human rights agency Btselem warned that the power cuts would jeopardise water supplies and health care. It stressed that Israel had the right to enact "all legal measures" to secure the release of Cpl Shalit but not those which conflict with international humanitarian law prohibitions against "objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population".
Haaretz:
Gaza is three days away from a deadly humanitarian crisis unless Israel promptly restores fuel and electricity to the densely populated area after its offensive to free an abducted soldier, the United Nations aid chief warned on Thursday.
"They are heading for the abyss unless they get electricity and fuel restored," said Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland, who also urged the Palestinians to free the soldier and clamp down on militants firing rockets into Israel.
Without clean water in the hot summer weather, "we would in days see a major humanitarian crisis," he said. Military action targeting innocent civilians violates international humanitarian law, he added.
The International Committee of the Red Cross is also concerned for civilians. The ICRC has requested access for delivery of essential medical supplies and reminded Israel of its obligation under international law to ensure adequate food and water supplies are maintained to civilians. The ICRC also expressed concern about fuel supplies for emergency hospital generators, notiing that scarce supplies were expected to run out in 7 to 10 days. It will take more than 6 months to rebuild the power transformers at the electricity plant, even if Israel cooperates by permitting supplies of parts and equipment.
Israel has played down the humanitarian crisis it is creating:
"Our immediate goal is to secure the release of Cpl. Shalit," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry. "We will do what we can to avert a humanitarian crisis."
The collective punishment of Palestinians and their children is the result of their exercise in democracy in January, electing Hamas to power against the wishes and warnings of the USA and Israel.
British journalist John Pilger, in a cover story for The New Statesman two weeks ago, explained the rationale of targeting children for disease and death. His pessimism is more striking for coming two weeks before the current assaults on civilian infrastructure so essential to life.
The reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subjugating its own people on Israel's behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures and corruption of the Yasser Arafat era. According to former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the Hamas electoral victory, "public opinion polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel".
How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its "moderate" dreams of freedom. Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18 months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a time-honoured tactic.
Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children ... killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints ... on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest -- the sniper's wound". A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve".
The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The soldiers refused."
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half are under 15 years of age. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4% of the children we studied suffer trauma ... 99.2% had their homes bombarded; 97.5% were exposed to tear gas; 96.6% witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed".
BBC Survey of Press reaction in the Middle East