Lindsey Hilsum on crime and punishment in Israel

The British government likes to be even-handed in its Middle East policy, which may explain its stance towards Gaza. On the one hand, Israel's bombing of the main electricity station, which has caused 12- to 18-hour power cuts daily for the past three weeks, is collective punishment - a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, it isn't.

When I asked the Foreign Office if attacking the source of power for ordinary residents of Gaza was defined as collective punishment, I was told: "It certainly looks like that." Yet a few days later, when asked the same question on The World at One, the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, replied: "It's not a phrase that I would use." The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has decided that condemning Israel is not "helpful". Instead, British government policy is to call for "restraint". Well, that is helpful.

Following the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, on 25 June, the Israeli military pushed into Gaza. As I write, more than 50 Palestinians have been killed, about 20 of them civilians, according to news agency reports. Add to them the family killed by an Israeli shell on the beach a few weeks before the soldier's kidnap, and a 15-month-old baby who was hit in an Israeli air raid on 21 June and died three weeks later. So much for restraint.

The Israelis reply that Palestinian militants fire home-made Qassam rockets into Israel, and even hit a school car park on 4 July. Mercifully, it was empty. But, while not minimising the trauma to the residents of Ashkelon and Sderot, towns within the range of the Qassam, it has to be said that the Palestinian arsenal cannot compete with the Israeli. Eight people in Israel have been killed by these rickety rockets since June 2004, according to the Israeli army. Every death is an individual tragedy, but - to state the obvious - eight dead in two years is not as many as 20 in three weeks.

Which is why the European Union, after about ten days of squirming and muttering, popped up and described Israel's actions as "dis proportionate". Indeed. The Americans have said almost nothing, a clear message to the Israelis that it is OK to terrify and kill Gazan citizens with constant sonic booms and shelling. Life is pretty grim in Gaza anyway, but now even the simple pleasure of going to the beach is too dangerous, because shelling may come from naval ships off the coast. A friend described watching boys splashing in the sea and then running inland, screaming in terror at the sound of the sonic boom, a tactic used by the Israeli military to intimidate.

A recent opinion poll in Gaza showed 77 per cent of Palestinians supported the kidnap of Corporal Shalit, who was snatched by militants on a raid into Israel. They may be right that he can be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, but the cost of the Israeli response is immense, and at some point he becomes a liability. Sixty per cent approved the futile rocketing of Israeli towns, which has no military purpose but scares and sometimes harms Israeli children. Such enthusiasm for violence may be a mark of desperation, but it only makes hard lives harder.

Many Israelis, meanwhile, are agitating for even more pressure on Gaza, arguing that the Hamas government needs to be taught a lesson or finished off. A few months ago, Israeli officials told reporters that they hoped to make life for Palestinians so miserable that people would demonstrate and fight. The idea was to destabilise the newly elected government so it would fall. They drew up plans - including getting warrants from judges - and used the kidnap of the soldier as a trigger, arresting dozens of Palestinian legislators, including eight Hamas ministers.

In fact, the factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah, the party that lost the Palestinian election in January, has stopped since Israel launched Operation Summer Rains, its current offensive. By intensifying the crisis, the Israelis may have - if only temporarily - united Palestinians. But even if the policy were to work and the Hamas government were to fall, what then? The Israelis seem to think that the Palestinians will blame Hamas for it all, and elect a government more pleasing to Israel.

That seems unlikely. Last Saturday, a six-year-old girl, Rawan Hajaj, was killed with her mother and brother while drinking tea in their garden near the Karni crossing point. Family members who had stayed inside to watch an Egyptian soap opera on television were wounded. The Israelis say this was not an Israeli strike, but a Palestinian anti-tank weapon that went astray.

No one in Gaza believes this. Rawan Hajaj's great-aunt didn't rail against Hamas but against Israel and its American backers. She turned to the ever-present TV camera and shouted: "Look at what your weapons are doing to us. All of Palestine is ours and Israel must leave our land. One day the Muslim countries will change everything, and there will be hard days for America. Injustice never lasts."

What does persist on both sides, however, is the belief, against all the evidence, that violence can secure a resolution.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

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