Gaza: While the world looked elsewhere, another week of death and misery

It was also, he didn't need to remind anybody, the house outside which he had passed the most hellish 15 minutes he will ever live through.

Forty-eight hours earlier he had been in the morgue at Kamal Adwan hospital distraught and weeping as he wrote down the names on a cigarette packet while the refrigeration trays were opened in turn to reveal the bodies of his 10-year-old son, Saad, three of his brothers and nine of his other close relatives, lost as they tried to flee through the choking smoke and dust from the barrage of shells fired by an Israeli artillery battery.

The puddles in the dirt road beside the building through which the family had tried to flee were no longer dark red with blood as they had been on Wednesday. Someone, too, had moved the chickens killed by shrapnel from the backyard. But last Tuesday's wash was still there, women's long dresses, a child's frayed orange tracksuit trousers, some blouses, hanging from poles dislodged by the blasts.

The Western world, which was anyway more interested by the count in the state of Virginia than the catastrophe in Beit Hanoun, has no doubt already moved on. For the Athamneh family, now in their second day of mourning after the funerals, it is impossible to do so.

Majdi's cousin Munir Athamneh, 36, who had lived across the road, sat smoking a cigarette and weeping yesterday, hunched and alone in the doorway of the building. He pointed to the still visible patches of blood on the ground across the alley where he had first seen, amid the confusion and screams of panic, the bodies of his two brothers lying by the wall. He, too, struggled to explain his presence here two days later. "I came to see," he said simply.

Five miles away from here and an hour or so earlier, the poverty-stricken and increasingly desperate 1.3 million residents of Gaza had been thrown what may prove their first real lifeline since the beginning of international economic blockade against the new Hamas government they had elected almost 10 months ago. Ishmail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Prime Minister, offered publicly to step down if it was necessary to ease the boycott. He was cheered by stunned worshippers when he announced at a Gaza City mosque: "When the issue of the siege is on one side, and my being Prime Minister is on the other, let the siege be lifted to end the suffering of the Palestinian people."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1963264.ece