It is a measure of the scale of the error made on Monday by the Israeli military that President Bush described their action as "heavy handed". Criticism of Israel from the United States is rare indeed but heavy handed is hardly the phrase that would come to many people's lips when summing up the appalling consequences of the attack in Gaza City.
What happened would more accurately be termed a reckless error of judgment - an error that cost 15 people their lives, including nine children, and wounded at least 145 others. Given the scale of casualties, it seems incidental that among the dead was the intended target of the attack, Salah Shehada, a military strategist in Hamas, the extreme Palestinian organisation behind the suicide bombers who are spreading death and destruction among the (mostly civilian) people of Israel.
The civilised world is rightly appalled when it hears the prime minister of Israel, Mr Sharon, describe an action with such consequences as a "great success". His words stretch to the limits the sympathy most of the rest of the world feels for Israel in its struggle to live in peace and security among its neighbours, a cause it has been forced to prosecute by defending to the death its very right to exist. However, Israel's conduct under Mr Sharon begs the question as to whether he prefers to live in a state of near perpetual war with Palestinians (and Mr Yasser Arafat in particular), rather than negotiate peaceful co-existence. As one of his predecessors and an architect of the Middle East peace process, Mr Rabin, famously said: "You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies." The trouble with Mr Sharon is that he has shown very little inclination to make peace.
In Israel yesterday, the scale of condemnation prompted inevitable recrimination with some politicians seeking to portray what happened as the result of the military acting off its own bat - the action was a "mistake" said the foreign minister, Mr Peres. The problem with this is that the Sharon government has created a climate of opinion towards the Palestinians which has encouraged the military to proceed with a reckless disregard that allows mistakes to happen. There needs to be a full and open investigation into who ordered an F-16 fighter jet to fire a so-called smart bomb into an apartment block whose occupants can only have included - and been known to include - very many civilians who were not of the same ilk as Mr Shehada.
The United Nations Security Council was meeting last night, at the request of Saudi Arabia, to discuss the crisis. There is likely to be more heat than light from this, as on so many other occasions when the UN has sought to bring to bear its influence on events in the Middle East. Prior to the start of the discussion, the Palestinian representative wrote to the Council describing the Israeli action as a "war crime" that fell within the ambit of the International Criminal Court.
If any good can come from this tragedy it will spring from the soul searching now taking place in Israel. Public pressure must be brought to bear on Mr Sharon to make peace with his enemies. He must put as much effort into negotiation as he is clearly willing to put into retaliation. And the Bush Administration should use its good offices firmly to encourage him in that direction.