The warning, delivered in Israel's high court by six human rights groups, came after the Israeli Defence Force reduced the so-called 'safety range' in Gaza from a 300-metre separation from built-up areas to just 100 metres - within the kill radius of its 155mm high-explosive shells, generally regarded as being between 50 and 150 metres.

Disclosure of the new shelling policy, which went largely unnoted at the time, has emerged in international outcry over the latest artillery incident by Israeli gunners shelling Gaza - the killing of 19 members of an extended family in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. It was the highest Palestinian civilian toll in a single incident since the current conflict erupted in September 2000. The deaths were caused when what witnesses described as a volley of tank shells hit a built-up civilian area.

The revelation follows reports that the shelling of Gaza has continued despite the recent recognition by senior Israeli military officers, including the head of the IDF's Southern Command, that indirect artillery fire (ie, firing without seeing the target) was largely pointless in countering Palestinian rocket fire.

According to Human Rights Watch, since September 2005 Israel has fired about 15,000 rounds at Gaza while Palestinian militants have fired around 1,700 back. The latest disclosures come as an Arab-backed motion condemning Israel's Gaza offensive was being circulated for debate at the UN Security Council and amid widening demonstrations in capitals of the Middle East.

As more details of the Beit Hanoun incident have emerged, including Israel's admission that the shells that killed the family were in response to the firing of Qassam rockets, probably from a car driven into the area by militants the previous day, they have raised more questions than they have answered.

The IDF has claimed a fault in the artillery radar system's co-ordinates for the missiles changed the margin of error from 25 to 200m, but that still does not explain why it waited until the following day to return fire to a general area - a policy that the Israeli peace group B'Tselem describes as a 'war crime'.

As well as provoking international concern, the Beit Hanoun killings have pushed into the open deep misgivings within the Israeli military itself over its use of artillery - and the capabilities of Israeli gunners - both in Gaza, and in the recent war in Lebanon, as an effective response to missile fire.

As a point of comparison, between June 2004 and July 2006, 14 civilians (six of them minors) were killed by Qassam gunfire fired by Palestinians into Israeli territory and at settlements in the Gaza Strip. In the four weeks from 26 June-24 July this year, however, IDF actions in the Gaza Strip to end the Qassam rocket fire caused the death of 126 Palestinians, 63 of whom did not participate in the hostilities. Twenty-nine of these were minors. According to the UN, since the end of June 450 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza.

Among those who have been loudly critical of the Israeli tactics in Gaza following Beit Hanoun is Lt Col Ron Ben Yishai, defence correspondent of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. 'Artillery is a weapon system designed to "cover" territory and not hit specific targets, particularly when it is used as "preventative fire" at territories rather than a specified target,' he wrote last week.

'These facts are well known to IDF officials, particularly after the recent Lebanon war when about 130,000 artillery shells were fired. Now it is clear that the effectiveness of this weapon against Hizbollah fighters was marginal, while the economic cost was astronomical and reached millions of dollars.

'Even before the Lebanon war it was proven that artillery fire failed in preventing or even minimising Qassam rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. This is the reason why the IDF Southern Command decided recently ... to stop, or at least highly limit, the use of preventative artillery fire.'

Israeli sources report that the missile was fired into Beit Hanoun after a homemade shell landed in Moshav Nativ Haasara in southern Israel, causing no damage. The sources claim that the shell was fired from somewhere near Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.

Also on Sunday morning, Mohammed Nabil, 18, died of wounds sustained during the massive attack on Beit Hanoun Wednesday that killed 18 people.

Nabil had been transported to an Israeli hospital on Wednesday, and died of his wounds on Sunday. His body was returned Sunday to Gaza, where his family (who were unable to visit him in the Israeli hospital) plan to bury him later today.

The diplomats spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The endorsement was the first time Hamas, which has refused to recognize Israel and renounce violence against the Jewish state, has indicated it would consider making amends with Israeli officials.

"The ministers call to convene a peace conference attended by Arab parties, Israel and the permanent members of the UN Security Council in order to reach a just and comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict on all tracks according to international resolutions and the principle of 'land for peace,'" the Arab League statement said.

Conference 'doesn't make Hamas legitimate': Israel

Arabs want Hamas to endorse a 2002 Arab initiative that trades peace with Israel with land gained by the Jewish state in the 1967 Middle East war.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, said he was not aware of the conference proposal, but said Hamas could not be a party to talks with Israel unless it met the international community's stipulations that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by existing Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

"A multilateral conference doesn't make Hamas legitimate," Regev said. "What makes Hamas legitimate is accepting the international benchmarks."

Sunday was the first time Zahar had attended an Arab foreign ministers' meeting since Hamas became the ruling Palestinian party earlier this year.

The Arab League had previously refused to let him join his counterparts unless Hamas accepted the peace initiative.

Aid restored in response to U.S. veto

Arab ministers also decided on Sunday to end a financial blockade on the Palestinians in response to a U.S. veto to a UN Security Council draft resolution condemning Israel's deadly military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

On Saturday, the U.S. vetoed the Security Council draft resolution that condemned the Israeli military offensive that has killed more 50 people recently and demanded that Israeli troops pull out of the territory.

In an effort to pressure Hamas to moderate its violent anti-Israel ideology, hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid and tax revenues was cut off to the Palestinians after the militant group took power in March.

It has sparked clashes between Hamas and its rival Fatah movement, as well as violent protests by Palestinian police over the government's inability to pay their salaries.

Among the 15 council members, 10 voted in favor and four -- Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia -- abstained. The United States voted against the draft resolution.

"The draft doesn't display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously," U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the council.

The United States is one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council which wield veto power.

Palestinian UN observer Riyad Mansour expressed disappointment over the vote, stressing the council was conveying two wrong messages to the outside.

"For Israel, you have conveyed to them they can continue to behave above international law. For the Palestinian people, you have conveyed that justice is not being dealt with in a proper way," he said.

Mansour told reporters later that foreign ministers of Arab nations would hold a meeting in Cairo on Sunday to decide the next steps.

He said one option was to bring the measure to a vote in the 192-nation UN General Assembly, where Washington does not have veto power.

It was the second time for the United States to cast a veto in the council this year on a draft resolution concerning Israeli military operations in Gaza.

On July 13, the United States killed a draft resolution reacting to an earlier Israeli incursion in Gaza in response to the capture of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants.

The Revolutionary Council of Fatah movement had also decided to form a highest committee to rebuild the movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

After late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat passed away two years ago, Farouq al-Qadoumi was elected as the Secretary General of Fatah, where Abbas was named as chief of Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee.

Abbas now is the chief of Fatah movement, chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee, and the president of the PNA. Late Arafat had these three titles before he died on Nov. 11, 2004.

Fatah movement, which was the ruling party over the past ten years, was defeated by Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the Jan. 25th legislative elections held in the Palestinian territories.

Fatah lost the government, while Hamas won the elections and formed the government for the first time since Hamas was established in December 1987.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip commemorated on Saturday and Sunday the two-year anniversary of late leader Yasser Arafat decease.

The website did not elaborate on the sources, but said they were close to Abbas.

The report also quoted Nezzar Rayan, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, as saying that the ruling Hamas movement had agreed with Abbas on a new prime minister.

But Rayan did not clarify who would be the new one.

Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan told reporters that his movement had nominated a prime minister candidate close to Hamas and confirmed that Abbas has accepted the candidate.

Shbair, 60, was famous for his academic activities and had been the president of the Hamas-dominated Islamic University for 13years.

Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haneya have been engaged in talks for months to form a unity government to replace incumbent Hamas-led one to end the current political and economic crises in the Palestinian territories.

After a general agreement to form a unity government, a committee tasked with outlining the government held its first meeting on Sunday. Senior members of both Hamas and Fatah were present at the meeting.

Ahmad Hallas, of the Fateh party, speaking at the rally in Gaza before the stage collapse, criticized Israel for its ongoing violence, particularly the killing of 19 civilians in Beit Hanoun on Wednesday, as well as the United States' veto of a measure condemning the attack in the United Nations. He said, "The massacre is backed by the US veto, this Israeli attack on the Strip would not be possible if it were not backed with the American power of veto. Every time the Americans use it, it sends encouragement to Israel."

The Hamas movement, the long-standing rival to Arafat's Fateh party, also joined commemoration of the late President. "The second anniversary of Arafat's death comes amidst noticeable escalation in Israel's terrorism against the Palestinian people who were further subjected to an unjust international political and economic embargo for expressing their democratic will", Fawzi Barhoum, the spokesman of Hamas in Gaza Strip, said.

And the Hamas movement, currently the ruling party in Palestine, since being elected in January, vowed to push an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Arafat's death. Ambiguities around the death of the late President two years ago have led many Palestinians to believe he was poisoned or otherwise assassinated by Israeli special forces.

The first revolutionary act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?

"Accident," said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. "Tragedy," said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between "event," "mistake" and "incident."

It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.

The word "accident" suggests something for which no one is to blame -- like being struck by lightning. A tragedy is a sad event or situation, like that of the New Orleans inhabitants after the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was sad indeed, but not an act of God -- it was an act decided upon and carried out by human beings.

Immediately after the facts became known, the entire choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases, sprang into feverish action.

"An unfortunate mistake ... It can happen in the best families ... The mechanism of a cannon can misfunction, people can make mistakes ... Errare humanum est ... We have launched tens of thousands of artillery shells, and there have only been three such accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz era was in Qana, in the Second Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza seashore, where a whole family was wiped out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What more can they demand from us?"

There were also arguments like "They can only blame themselves." As usual, it was the fault of the victims. The most creative solution came from the deputy minister of defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The practical responsibility is ours, but the moral responsibility is theirs." If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what else can we do but answer with shells?

Ephraim Sneh was raised to the position of deputy minister just now. The appointment was a payment for agreeing to the inclusion of Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical Hebrew, the payment would have been called "the hire of a whore," Deut. 23:19). Now, after only a few days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his thanks.

(In the Sneh family, there is a tradition of justifying despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father, Moshe Sneh, was the leader of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the massacres committed by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish "doctors plot").

Any suggestion of equivalence between Qassams and artillery shells, an idea which has been adopted even by some of the peaceniks, is completely false. And not only because there is no symmetry between occupier and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams launched during more than a year have killed one single Israeli. The shells, missiles and bombs have already killed many hundreds of Palestinians.

Did the shells hit the homes of people intentionally? There are only two possible answers to that.

The extreme version says: Yes. The sequence of events points in that direction. The Israeli army, one of the most modern in the world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the most primitive of weapons. This short-range unguided rocket (named after Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in a battle against the British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a pipe filled with homemade explosives.

In a futile attempt to prevent the launching of Qassams, the Israeli forces invade the towns and villages of the Gaza Strip at regular intervals and institute a reign of terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun and killed more than 50 people, many of them women and children. The moment they left, the Palestinians started to launch as many Qassams as possible against Ashkelon, in order to prove that these incursions do not deter them.

That increased the frustration of the generals even more. Ashkelon is not a remote poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most of whose inhabitants are of Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also an elitist population of European descent. The army chiefs, having lost their honor in Lebanon, were eager -- according to this version -- to teach the Palestinians a lesson, once and for all. According to the Israeli saying: If force doesn't work, use more force.

The other version holds that it was a real mistake, an unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander of an army knows very well that a certain incidence of "hitches" is unavoidable. So-and-so many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many percent die from "friendly fire," so-and-so many percent of shells fall some distance from the target. The ammunition used by the gunners against Beit-Hanoun -- the very same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana -- is known for its inaccuracy. Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their course by hundreds of meters.

He who decided to use this ammunition against a target right next to civilians knowingly exposed them to mortal danger. Therefore, there is no essential difference between the two versions.

Who is to blame? First of all, the spirit that has gained ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy disclosed that a battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: "We have won by 12 to 0!"

Guilty are, of course, the gunners and their commanders, including the battery chief. And the general in charge of the Southern Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates indifference spiked with sanctimonious platitudes. And the deputy chief of staff. And the chief of staff, Dan Halutz, the air force general who said after another such incident that he sleeps well at night after dropping a one-ton superbomb on a residential area. And, of course, the minister of defense, Amir Peretz, who approved the use of artillery after forbidding it in the past -- which means that he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.

The guiltiest one is the Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert, the prime minister.

Olmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior of his government "we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and the world has not reacted." According to Olmert, a "terrorist" is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and children, who are killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: The children grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up to be terrorists.)

Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world keeps silent. Today the United States even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world -- America, Europe, the Arab world -- are accessories to the crime at Beit Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.

The world did not pay much attention to the massacre, because it happened on U.S. election day. The results of the election may sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.

A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them with a new moron.

But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American people have accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands of dead, what the advocates of peace around the world -- including us here in Israel -- were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.

The change will not be quick and dramatic. The United States is a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs a lot of time -- unlike Israel, a small speedboat that can turn almost on the spot. But the direction is clear.

Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence, perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American Army will have to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neoconservatives, most of them Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power, together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.

As former Prime Minister Levy Eshkol once said: when America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America starts to recover, perhaps there will be hope for us, too.