How many fathers and sons must lie in the sands sleeping … forever … before the guns are silenced?

Why a school? Did they mistake it for a military depot or an ammunition dump? In today’s hi-tech wars, there is enough backup to ensure precision targeting. You have radar, thermal imaging, drones, high-altitude photography, even Google Earth lends a hand. Now, either you don’t care to maintain the basic ethical codes of combat and see combatants as separate from civilians caught in a crossfire or you deliberately intend to eliminate everything in your path and have no compunctions about the collateral damage.

In this case the Israelis have clearly shown that both factors have come into play. They don’t care and they make no differentiation between Hamas strongholds and schools and hospitals.

That the world is horrified by the flow of violent images is putting it mildly. But even as public opinion is now shifting strongly towards global condemnation (who can support the killing of children and the miasma of fear that hangs over every waking moment, not that sleep is an option) this is not enough.

Three schools have been hit in three days. There is a pattern and one is loath to understand how Israeli intelligence is getting it wrong. Certainly, the soldiers themselves must be feeling a sense of severe guilt when they see that their bullets are killing those innocents who have not yet begun to live.

This is also the first time that the UN has risen above its usual middle of the road conciliatory sermonizing and actually called the strikes ‘inhuman.’

Ban Ki-moon has gone on record as saying this madness must stop. When the shells struck the UN-run school were 3,000 Palestinian civilians seeking shelter in its confines.

But condemnation is the equivalent of waving a tired olive branch in the face of a charging man-eater. He isn’t going to stop. And hopes in some sort of magical rapprochement in Egypt or in negotiating a peace proposal are currently belied with the Israelis not even prepared to come to the table. While the tactical withdrawal of armor and troops from parts of the West Bank have occurred in the past 24 hours the artillery barrage makes it a moot point that peace has found a way to wriggle into the blood drenched equation.

This is a situation more inclined toward stock checking than stopping the bloodbath. Even as the photographs almost put everyone into overload and short circuits the rage there is no guarantee that anything has stopped and peace being uninvited to the party still has no tangible role in it.

It is now time for concerted action. Where the powers of our world come together to stop what is essentially genocide in the 21st century. Not since Rwanda have we seen such callousness.

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