Israel v Palestine: which side is the left on?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Published 18 October 1999

Memoirs by academics don't usually cause an angry public stir, but then Edward W Said is an unusual academic. For years past he has combined his work as a professor of English at Columbia University in New York with championing the dispossessed Palestinians. For his pains, Said has been maligned and misrepresented. The Wall Street Journal called him "the professor of terror"; in fact, this former member of the Palestine National Council has specifically disavowed terrorism.

Now he has published a memoir of his upbringing, Out of Place (Granta, £25), and his enemies have returned to the attack. In Commentary, a bastion of uncompromising Zionism, Justus Reid Weiner accuses Said of embroidering his story to make himself seem more Palestinian than he is and more of a victim of the Naqba, the fall of Palestine in 1948, when Israel was created and Palestinians driven out.

The outlines of Said's story are actually clear enough. His family are Christian Arabs from the Levant, mostly from the area known as Palestine. He airily says he had "assumed a longish family history in Jerusalem", but later learnt his people were from Nazareth. His father settled in Egypt in the 1930s and made a fortune in office equipment. Said was born in Palestine because an earlier child had died soon after birth in an unsatisfactory Egyptian hospital. Family life stretched from cosmopolitan Egypt to Lebanon, where the Saids holidayed until 1948.

It is equally clear that Said has sometimes been wayward with personal detail. One article by Nubar Hovsepian, written in 1992 with Said's approval, stated that Said's family "went to Cairo in 1947". Here, and on other occasions, he has not done everything he could to discourage the idea that he had largely grown up in Jerusalem before his family was forced out.

More generally, Said has a light-hearted attitude to fact. The oddest sentence in Out of Place has nothing to do with Palestine. Said's father went to America before the first world war, joined the American army and claimed to have fought on the western front. He would give his son lurid accounts of killing a German soldier. Later Said discovered that his father had not participated in any known campaign. But, "this was probably a mistake, since I still believe my father's version."

This row over where Edward Said comes from is less interesting than the broader question of what he represents and what his nation is. All the attempts to discredit Said as a spokesman of the Palestinian cause are plainly intended to discredit the cause as a whole. And this is a reminder of the complex of falsehoods and contradictions on both sides of the debate, receding like the images in facing mirrors.

Take the Zionist side first. There is an honest case for saying that the need of the Jewish people for a homeland and a refuge has been so great that it superseded all other considerations, even if it involved a huge injustice to the Palestinians. What is intolerable is to maintain that no injustice took place.

In the early days of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl was candid in private about the possible need to remove the indigenous Arabs of Palestine but evasive in public, sometimes claiming that the Arabs would welcome the Zionists, sometimes ignoring them completely. Likewise Israel Zangwill coined the notorious phrase "a land without people for a people without land" to describe Palestine.

Whatever is said about Said, he did have cousins who owned houses in what is now a purely Jewish district of west Jerusalem. And, in 1948, three-quarters of a million Palestinians fled out of terror, not perversity.

For years afterwards, the world closed its eyes to this, and many Jews retreated into a cocoon of denial. There were honourable exceptions. Writing in the NS in 1965, Bernard Levin said that his admiration for the Israeli achievement was combined "with the strongest condemnation of her crime against the original Arab population and the campaign of lies she has waged ever since".

That campaign included Golda Meir's notorious words: "There are no Palestinians." In the 30 years since, the Israelis have become more candid, at least among themselves. Israeli "new historians" have ruthlessly dissected patriotic myths. And the series Tekuma (Rebirth) shown on Israeli television last year enraged nationalists. Ariel Sharon, then a minister in Binyamin Netanyahu's government, said the series abandoned "every moral basis for the establishment and existence of the state of Israel".

Zionists saw their movement as a psychological and social and not just as a political project, to redeem the Jews from their fallen state, and in all ways virtuous and enlightened. It was thus difficult, if not morally impossible, for many Zionists - and their supporters in the west - to admit that the Jewish state was created by brute force, terror and mass expulsion. Hence the particularly ludicrous insistence by dogmatic Zionists that the creation of the Jewish state "was not a colonial enterprise".

It is that sort of mystical evasion that can make earlier right-wing Zionists seem more attractive than their political heirs like Sharon. When Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896, no Palestinian national consciousness existed, and scarcely any Arab consciousness. If you had asked a man from Jaffa or Jerusalem what he was, he would have said, "I am a Muslim from here". He didn't know that he was a Palestinian, or an Arab. Not long before you would have received a similar reply throughout much of Europe. A man from a village near Bratislava or Zagreb would have said "I am a Christian from here". He did not know that he was a Slovak or a Croat, or that the dialect he spoke made him a member of a nation.

National consciousness is much misrepresented by historians and by nationalists, who project their consciousness on to people of another age. At the time of the Risorgimento in the 1860s, very few "Italians" knew they were Italian (or spoke anything recognisable as Italian).

And yet, when that is said, one thing needs to be added. The creation of Palestine, the Palestinian people and Palestinian national identity has been among the most signal achievements of Zionism.

All of this crept up unawares on the left, which in my lifetime has changed its tune on Israel and Palestine in a way that might even seem capricious. Anyone younger than 40 might not guess how popular Israel and Zionism once were on the left. An adulatory profile of David Ben-Gurion written in 1955 treated him as a noble hero, and reproached him only for having devoted his military force to conquering the empty Negev desert in 1948, when he "might have cleared the hills of Samaria". It also sympathised with Ben-Gurion's dread that Israelis might be "Levantinised".

This did not appear in the Jewish Chronicle or a rabid Israeli publication, but in the NS. That was the spirit of the age. If you wanted to read anti-Zionist polemics at that time you had to turn to the far right, to a magazine such as the Mosleys' European.

Having been insufficiently criticised in her first 20 years, Israel has been too severely critcised over the past 30 years. And the way the left has taken up Palestine's cause long after the original deed of expulsion contains a further paradox, one that is illustrated by Said's life and work.

He is a tribune of the Palestinians, a foe of imperialism and a self-proclaimed man of the left. And yet the moral case against imperialism is reactionary, not progressive. Marx praised British imperialism in Asia, where "these idyllic village communities, inoffensive as they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism . . . they restrained the human mind . . . making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rule, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies". Engels praised the French conquest of Algeria as "an important and fortunate fact for the progress of civilisation".

It would be logical enough for anyone else who believes in such progress to see it embodied in Zionism. A truly ruthless progressive could point out that there is nothing so unusual about the fate of the Palestinians. The partition of India in 1947 was accompanied by the flight of at least 17 million people, at least a million of whom died. Two years earlier, more than 12 million Germans living east and south of the Oder, in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia and Bohemia, were brutally expelled by the Red Army and its local allies.

Once again, it was the spirit of the age. Before the 1945 election, the Labour Party published a policy statement on "The International Post-War Settlement", principally written by Hugh Dalton, the formidable if unlovable economist who became Attlee's chancellor. It advocated the creation of a Jewish state by means of "transfer": "Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in . . . The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine."

The illogic of the left's change of tune on imperialism was examined in Imperialism: pioneer of capitalism, a brilliant book by an English Marxist, Bill Warren, published posthumously in 1980. But it was also foreseen by George Orwell. Said predictably dislikes him; he may not know a riveting passage written in 1945. Orwell observed that only the Jewish side of the argument in the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine was heard by European socialists and American liberals. And yet, Orwell went on, "the Palestine issue is partly a colour issue", in which "an Indian nationalist, for example, would probably side with the Arabs". This has echoed for half a century since, and explains why, to the grief of Israelis and western Jews, Israel has become a pariah in the developing world.

There is one more contradiction. Said is aware of, and resents, he writes in Culture and Imperialism, the way that "debates today about third world nationalism" reflect "a marked (and, in my opinion, ahistorical) discomfort with non-western societies acquiring national independence, which is believed to be 'foreign' to their ethos".

But the truth is that the kind of nationalism, and the kinds of politics, which have dominated the developing world for 50 years are quite simply European concepts and European exports, just as much as Christianity or capitalism before them. Said is a striking personification of this phenomenon. He is concerned with a movement that is "Eurocentric" in its origins: like the "African National Congress", the "Palestine Liberation Organisation" is a very western concept. In his intellectual life equally, Said has studied English and European literature, not Islamic culture. He is also a pianist and musical scholar, who worships Beethoven and Wagner. He even writes engagingly about tennis, one more cultural by-product of British imperialism.

The accidents of his birth are irrelevant to the real truth, that Edward Said is a man of the west; and to the larger truth that the world we live in today has been made by Europe. Do I need to add "for better or worse"?

Palestine's future is in our hands. New Statesman

Hamas must be required to make a gesture; this should coincide with a longer-term economic package and a new political dialogue with Israel

Out of sight of some, and out of mind of many, a fledgling nation is dying. Palestine - a grandiose term for two strips of land surrounded by a more powerful state with which it has long been at war - is on the brink of collapse. According to the international community's special envoy, James Wolfensohn, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has roughly two weeks' money left. That was why on 27 February the European Union, with Washington's guarded consent, agreed a temporary financial package of E120m (£82m) to tide it over. Problem briefly deferred, but nowhere near solved.

Until a month ago, the major powers conspired in keeping the Palestinians alive - just. In recent years, the US and EU provided similar levels of funding (in 2005 a combined total of £600m) to the PA for food and humanitarian aid, infrastructure and other projects. All of it has been vital, but even with this help, the plight of Palestinians has been stark. According to a UK Treasury report, compiled for G8 finance ministers, GDP per capita is 30 per cent below the levels of 1999, and one-thirteenth of Israeli levels. Unemployment is running at 25 per cent, while poverty rates are rising steadily, with nearly a half of all Palestinians living below the official poverty line of $2 a day. This is expected to rise to nearly two- thirds of the population by 2008.

These hideous imbalances sharpened with the start of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. When relations were at their calmest, a third of Palestinian workers were employed inside Israel, and Israel received the biggest share of Palestinian exports. This has all but collapsed, a separation enshrined by Ariel Sharon in the construction of the wall.

The decisive victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections on 25 January signalled a point of no return. The Israelis insist they will have no contact with the incoming government unless Hamas revokes its founding charter, by renouncing violence and recognising Israel's right to exist. They are supported in this by the members of the Quartet - the EU, US, UN and Russia - with varying degrees of firmness. Furthermore, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has threatened to quit if progress is not made. It should be noted that the number of actual terrorist attacks has decreased recently. Furthermore, western states have long worked with Middle Eastern governments that have not recognised Israel.

Hamas faces an urgent predicament. No shift: no money. Many Palestinians voted for change as much for the pledge of a cleaner administration as for a hardening of policy towards Israel. Yet Iran provides an example, and not the only one, of governments finding popular support in stridency. This is a time for intelligent diplomacy, something that has been in short supply in recent years. Hamas must be required to make a gesture; this should coincide with a longer-term economic package, and thereafter by the beginnings of a political dialogue with Israel. Given the grievances, it will not be easy for either side to move, but move they must.

A sense of injustice and a lack of opportunities provide a key link (if not the only link) with terrorism. In the coming months the very survival of the Palestinian state will be determined. It is in the self-interest even of its detractors, Israel in particular, to help build that state, not destroy it.


Wanted: inspiration

The schooling of our children is far too important to be defined through one politician's survival. The battle over the government's Education and Inspections Bill has been dispiritingly narrow, in its focus and in the motivations of the competing sides. It matters less whether the Prime Minister gets the legislation through on the back of Tory support, and in the face of Labour rebellion, than what the planned changes will do for the next generation.

That is why, in our special issue on education this week, we have sought to set out the broader issues. As Peter Wilby argues in his compelling introductory essay (p22), the bill marks the defining moment in a Labour government's shift away from education as communal culture to education as instrument of individual ambition. The role of local education authorities, the amount of autonomy to be enjoyed by new "trust" or "foundation" schools, and the strength of the admissions code are the details. What they constitute, and what really matters, is the final departure from a comprehensive ideal that has been fraying for some years.

Tony Blair and a small, hardened circle around him have long been convinced that the only way of saving public services and justifying the continued rates of investment in them is to appeal to the notions of consumer choice they now believe are immutable. A discussion of the best school for one's children would be little different from the choice of holiday or supermarket, accompanied by a light regulatory framework. The PM has similarly convinced himself that, with the exception of the odd inspirational headteacher, education professionals cannot be relied upon without the intervention of parents and commercial organisations.

These arguments are bigger than the immediate politics. But as the bill is passionately debated inside and outside parliament this spring we, too, will have a point or two to make about what it means for Blair's future.

John Pilger on terror in Palestine

No front pages in the west mourn victims of the enduring bloodbath in occupied Palestine, the equivalent of the Madrid horror week after week, month after month

The current threat of attacks in countries whose governments have close alliances with Washington is the latest stage in a long struggle against the empires of the west, their rapacious crusades and domination. The motivation of those who plant bombs in railway carriages derives directly from this truth. What is different today is that the weak have learned how to attack the strong, and the western crusaders' most recent colonial terrorism (as many as 55,000 Iraqis killed) exposes "us" to retaliation.

The source of much of this danger is Israel. A creation, then guardian of the west's empire in the Middle East, the Zionist state remains the cause of more regional grievance and sheer terror than all the Muslim states combined. Read the melancholy Palestinian Monitor on the internet; it chronicles the equivalent of Madrid's horror week after week, month after month, in occupied Palestine. No front pages in the west acknowledge this enduring bloodbath, let alone mourn its victims. Moreover, the Israeli army, a terrorist organisation by any reasonable measure, is protected and rewarded in the west.

In its current human rights report, the Foreign Office criticises Israel for its "worrying disregard for human rights" and "the impact that the continuing Israeli occupation and the associated military occupations have had on the lives of ordinary Palestinians".

Yet the Blair government has secretly authorised the sale of vast quantities of arms and terror equipment to Israel. These include leg-irons, electric shock belts and chemical and biological agents. No matter that Israel has defied more United Nations resolutions than any other state since the founding of the world body. Last October, the UN General Assembly voted by 144 to four to condemn the wall that Israel has cut through the heart of the West Bank, annexing the best agricultural land, including the aquifer system that provides most of the Palestinians' water. Israel, as usual, ignored the world.

Israel is the guard dog of America's plans for the Middle East. The former CIA analysts Kathleen and Bill Christison have described how "two strains of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism have dovetailed into an agenda for a vast imperial project to restructure the Middle East, all further reinforced by the happy coincidence of great oil resources up for grabs and a president and vice-president heavily invested in oil".

The "neoconservatives" who run the Bush regime all have close ties with the Likud government in Tel Aviv and the Zionist lobby groups in Washington. In 1997, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) declared: "Jinsa has been working closely with Iraqi National Council leader Dr Ahmad Chalabi to promote Saddam Hussein's removal from office . . ." Chalabi is the CIA-backed stooge and convicted embezzler at present organising the next "democratic" government in Baghdad.

Until recently, a group of Zionists ran their own intelligence service inside the Pentagon. This was known as the Office of Special Plans, and was overseen by Douglas Feith, an under-secretary of defence, extreme Zionist and opponent of any negotiated peace with the Palestinians. It was the Office of Special Plans that supplied Downing Street with much of its scuttlebutt about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; more often than not, the original source was Israel.

Israel can also claim responsibility for the law passed by Congress that imposes sanctions on Syria and in effect threatens it with the same fate as Iraq unless it agrees to the demands of Tel Aviv. Israel is the guiding hand behind Bush's bellicose campaign against the "nuclear threat" posed by Iran. Today, in occupied Iraq, Israeli special forces are teaching the Americans how to "wall in" a hostile population, in the same way that Israel has walled in the Palestinians in pursuit of the Zionist dream of an apartheid state. The author David Hirst describes the "Israelisation of US foreign policy" as being "now operational as well as ideological".

In understanding Israel's enduring colonial role in the Middle East, it is too simple to see the outrages of Ariel Sharon as an aberrant version of a democracy that lost its way. The myths that abound in middle-class Jewish homes in Britain about Israel's heroic, noble birth have long been reinforced by a "liberal" or "left-wing" Zionism as virulent and essentially destructive as the Likud strain.

In recent years, the truth has come from Israel's own "new historians", who have revealed that the Zionist "idealists" of 1948 had no intention of treating justly or even humanely the Palestinians, who instead were systematically and often murderously driven from their homes. The most courageous of these historians is Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who, with the publication of each of his ground-breaking books, has been both acclaimed and smeared. The latest is A History of Modern Palestine, in which he documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore apart Jews and Arabs coexisting peacefully. As for the modern "peace process", he describes the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a plan by liberal Zionists in the Israeli Labour Party to corral Palestinians in South African-style bantustans. That they were aided by a desperate Palestinian leadership made the "peace" and its "failure" (blamed on the Palestinians) no less counterfeit. During the years of negotiation and raised hopes, governments in Tel Aviv secretly doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, intensified the military occupation and completed the fragmentation of the 22 per cent of historic Palestine that the Palestine Liberation Organisation had agreed to accept in return for recognising the state of Israel.

Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history. He is also one of the most scholarly. This combination has brought him many admirers, but also enemies among Israel's academic liberal mythologists in Britain, one of whom, Stephen Howe, was given the Pappe book to review in the New Statesman of 8 March. Howe often appears in these pages; his style is to damn with faint praise and to set carefully the limits of debate about empire, be it Irish history, the Middle East or the "war on terror". In Pappe's case, what the reader doesn't know is Howe's personal link to the Israeli establishment; and what Howe does not say in his review is that here for the first time is a textbook on Palestine that narrates the real story as it happened: a non-Zionist version of Zionism.

He accuses Pappe of "factual mistakes", but gives no evidence, then denigrates the book by dismissing it as a footnote to another book by the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who has long atoned for his own revisionist work. To its credit, Cambridge University Press has published Pappe's pioneering and highly accessible work as an authoritative history. This means that the "debate" over Israel's origins is ending, regardless of what the empire's apologists say.

Farming Palestine b y Ben QWhite New Statesman

'Palestinian olive farmers face assault and interference by Israeli settlers some of whom are gun-hugging bigots who cannot bear the sight of Palestinians working the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’'


In what is becoming somewhat of an annual tradition, recent weeks have seen dozens of stories in the international media about the difficulties facing Palestinians during the olive harvest season. Ever since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, the West Bank olive harvest has been extensively covered by the press, with reporters accompanying Palestinian farmers and villagers out to the groves.

The olive harvest, as a proportion of the Palestinian economy, is not particularly big, but for many families and villages, it represents the prime, or even only, source of income. The olive tree is also invested with heavy symbolic value; rooted in the soil, ancient, it has come to represent Palestinian steadfastness in the face of concerted efforts to remove them from their land.

The restrictions and problems faced by the Palestinians are easily summarised: some have land the wrong side of Israel’s Separation Wall, a no-man’s land totalling 10 per cent of the West Bank, increasingly cut off from the rest of the Occupied Territories. Those farmers separated from their groves by the Wall depend on permission by the Israeli military to reach their property, access that is often granted for far less time than is necessary.

There are Palestinians who complain that the IDF, while assisting in some places, cause problems in others. On the other hand, it is clear that in some cases the Civil Administration (the occupation’s bureaucracy for managing the Palestinian population) have coordinated the harvest ahead of time with the military and Palestinian communities, to ensure things go smoothly.

The reason why such a high degree of planning is required is not just because of Israeli measures such as travel permissions, checkpoints, and the Wall. Perhaps the most high-profile problem facing the farmers is assault and interference by Israeli settlers. Not all settlers are gun-hugging bigots – but the ones that are, cannot bear the sight of Palestinians working the land of ‘Judea and Samaria’ that belongs to the Jewish people.

Palestinians, international observers, and Israeli volunteers have all been subjected to threats, physical attack, intimidation, while olive trees and harvest tools have been vandalised. The extent of the violence across the West Bank provoked Ehud Barak into publicly lambasting the settlers responsible as “hooligans”, while Mahmoud Abbas wondered why the Israeli army could not simply stop the settlers.

The story of the olive harvest is repeated in similar fashion: Palestinian villagers face numerous obstacles due to Israeli security measures and the risk of attacks by extremist settlers. Some Israeli soldiers help and some don’t seem to do much, while other Israelis – like Rabbis for Human Rights – have actually chosen to help the Palestinians harvest.

This is often as far as it goes, with the bigger picture left out. Firstly, and obviously, the restrictions faced by Palestinians and enforced by the IDF are not just a problem in October and November, but all year round. Secondly, while sometimes presented as regrettably harsh but necessary security measures, the network of checkpoints, limited access roads and barriers – reinforced by paperwork – are in fact elements of the apartheid system in the West Bank, separating Israelis and Palestinians, and Palestinians from their land and livelihoods.

Secondly, a lot of the coverage of events in the West Bank in recent months has given the impression that there is increased tension and violence between settlers and Palestinians on account of a new, more ‘radical’ generation emerging – the so-called ‘hilltop youth’ settlers – who defy their elders and set up unauthorised outposts outside the established colony’s boundaries.

Yet these outposts are a distraction, their ‘illegality’ an entirely disingenuous distinction between one kind of illegitimate colony and another. Moreover, the problem in the West Bank is not one of ‘religious extremist’ settlers; it is the entire Israeli ‘matrix of control’ and colony network that covers Palestinian land with land-grabbing, territory-fragmenting fortresses.

The main settlement blocs, state-sponsored of course, have even been growing, along with their associated settler-only roads, ‘security’ buffer zones and the like. The right-wing nuts in the outposts might get the headlines, but it is the blocs of Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, Gush Etzion (not to mention the East Jerusalem) that mean Palestinian statehood remains a hypothetical rather than anything approaching reality.

A reporter on the Arabic TV network Abu Dhabi observed the hurried, furtive olive-picking of the Palestinians and noted how it looked as if the farmers were stealing their own olives. An aptly ironic microcosm of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, as they are made to feel like interlopers in their own land by both settler extremists, and the Israeli state itself.

pictures of conflict december 2008 2

Pictures of conflict December 2008

Palestinians bury the body of four year old Lama Hamdan

'I didn't see any of my girls, just a pile of bricks'

Israeli air strike kills five daughters from one family as Gaza death toll passes 300

The family house was small: three rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, built of poor-quality concrete bricks with a corrugated asbestos roof, in block four of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There are hundreds of similar homes crammed into the overcrowded streets, filled with some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the Gaza Strip.

But it was this house, where Anwar and Samira Balousha lived with their nine children, that had the misfortune to be built next to what became late on Sunday night another target in Israel's devastating bombing campaign of Gaza.

An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp's Imad Aqil mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it also brought down the Balousha family's house, which yesterday lay in ruins. The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four.

They were the latest in a growing number of civilian casualties in Israel's bombing campaign. At least 335 Palestinians have been killed and as many as 1,400 injured. On the Israeli side, four people have been killed by Palestinian rockets. Israel's military offensive continues and may yet intensify.

Imam, 16, lay in the room with her sisters but by chance survived with only injuries to her legs. She was eventually pulled free and rushed to hospital. "I was asleep. I didn't hear anything of the explosion," she said yesterday as she sat comforting her mother. "I just woke when the bricks fell on me. I saw all my sisters around me and I couldn't move. No one could see me from above. The neighbours and ambulance men couldn't see us. They were walking on the bricks above us. I started to scream and told my sisters we would die. We all screamed: 'Baba, Mama. Come to help us.'"

Her parents had been sleeping in the room next door with their two youngest children, Muhammad, one, and Bara'a, 12 days.

Their room was damaged and all were hurt, but they survived and were taken straight to hospital even before any of the older girls were found.

Imam eventually recognised her uncle's voice among the rescuers and she shouted again for help. "He found me and started to remove the bricks and the rubble from me," she said. "They started to pull me by my hands, the bricks were still lying on my legs."

Her mother, Samira, 36, had seen the pile of bricks in the girls' bedroom and was stricken with grief, convinced they were all dead. Like all the family, she was asleep when the bomb struck. "I opened my eyes and saw bricks all over my body," she said. "My face was covered with the concrete blocks."

She checked on her two youngest children and then looked in the room next door. "I didn't see any of my daughters, just a pile of bricks and parts of the roof. Everyone told me my daughters were alive, but I knew they were gone."

She sat on a sofa surrounded by other women at a neighbour's house further along the street and struggled to speak, pausing for long moments and still overcome with shock.

"I hope the Palestinian military wings retaliate and take revenge with operations inside Israel. I ask God to take revenge on them," she said.

Her husband, Anwar, 40, sat in another house where a mourning tent had been set up. He was pale and still suffering from serious injuries to his head, his shoulder and his hands. But like many other patients in Gaza he had been made to leave an overcrowded hospital to make way for the dying. Yesterday his house was a pile of rubble: collapsed walls and the occasional piece of furniture exposed to the sky. He spoke bitterly of his daughters' deaths. "We are civilians. I don't belong to any faction, I don't support Fatah or Hamas, I'm just a Palestinian. They are punishing us all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?" Like many men in Gaza, Anwar has no job, and like all in the camp he relies on food handouts from the UN and other charity support to survive.

"If the dead here were Israelis, you would see the whole world condemning and responding. But why is no one condemning this action? Aren't we human beings?" he said. "We are living in our land, we didn't take it from the Israelis. We are fighting for our rights. One day we will get them back."

Israel pounds Hamas in Gaza

Palestinian children flee past a bombed Hamas ministry building in Gaza City. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images

• Government buildings destroyed in latest air strikes
• Hospitals overflow with casualties as civilian death toll mounts

Israel has continued bombing Gaza for a fourth day, hitting government buildings in Gaza City today and threatening a drawn-out conflict as the Palestinian death toll rose to at least 364.

Palestinian militants stepped up rocket attacks that yesterday killed three Israeli civilians in towns in southern Israel: among them, a woman was killed at a bus stop in the city of Ashdod, the farthest north a rocket from Gaza has so far reached, and a soldier was killed by a mortar fired from Gaza.

Early today, Israeli planes dropped at least 16 bombs on five government buildings in Gaza, destroying them and starting several fires. Palestinian officials said 10 people died in the latest attacks.

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, who has said his government does not want another ceasefire with Hamas, said his army was fighting a "war to the bitter end".

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had told the country's president, Shimon Peres, that the current aerial phase of the operation was "the first of several" that had been approved, an Olmert spokesman said.

Israel has declared the border area around Gaza a closed military zone. Together with preparations to call up thousands of reservists, this could suggest a large ground invasion is planned next. Barak said the military campaign would be "widened and deepened as needed".

The number of civilians killed has continued to rise. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which supports Palestinian refugees and has large programmes in Gaza, said it believed at least 62 civilians were dead, at a conservative estimate. The overall number of injured is thought to be as high as 1,400, although Gazan hospitals are so overcrowded and short of medicine and equipment that they are turning away all but the most seriously wounded.

The Israeli interior minister, Meir Sheetrit, said there was "no room for a ceasefire" with Hamas until the threat of rocket fire had been removed. "The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel," he told Israel Radio. Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, said the military "has made preparations for long weeks of action".

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, called for swift and decisive action to end the "unacceptable" violence, and urged world leaders to step up pressure for a political solution. In his third statement on Gaza in three days, Ban said he was "deeply alarmed" by the escalation of violence. While recognising Israel's right to defend itself, he condemned its "excessive use of force".

The Bush administration refused to call on Israel to show restraint, instead blaming the conflict solely on Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel. "Israel is going after terrorists who are firing rockets and mortars into Israel, and they are taking the steps that they feel are necessary to deal with the terrorist threat," said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman.

"In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable ceasefire."

Israel had told the US it was not planning to retake Gaza, Johndroe said.

Apart from anger in the Arab world, governments elsewhere have been quiet, with little public criticism of Israel – in contrast with previous similar offensives.

The pope had been scheduled to make his first trip to Israel in May, but a spokesman interviewed by Vatican radio said this was no longer certain. "There is a need to be rather prudent," Father Federico Lombardi said. The pontiff urged both sides to restore a truce and not to yield to the "perverse logic of confrontation and violence".

Despite mounting public pressure, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, said today he would not fully open the Rafah crossing into the Gaza Strip while Hamas, rather than the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority, remains in control of the border.

"We will not deepen the division and that breach [between Hamas and Fatah] by opening the Rafah border crossing in the absence of the Palestinian Authority and the European Union monitors," Mubarak said.

In the Yemeni city of Aden, hundreds of protesters stormed the Egyptian consulate, setting fire to the national flag on the roof and throwing computers out of the windows, in the latest sign of anger in the region at Egypt.

In Damascus, a senior Hamas leader said the group's conditions for a fresh ceasefire were a halt to Israeli attacks in Gaza and the West Bank and a reopening of the crossings into Gaza – conditions Israel has previously refused.

"We are going to defend ourselves, defend our people and defend our land," Moussa Abu Marzouk, the deputy head of the Hamas politburo, told Associated Press. "We need our liberty, we need our freedom and we need to be independent. If we don't accomplish this objective then we have to resist. This is our right." Hamas leaders in Gaza were in hiding last night.

One of Israel's targets in bombing raids before dawn yesterday was the Islamic University in Gaza City, the territory's main university and one with links to Hamas. Two buildings housing science and engineering laboratories were flattened and six others damaged.

Gaza's streets were empty again and Israeli military drones and jets could be heard overhead. The only crowds were queues at bakeries. Israel again prevented journalists from entering Gaza to report on the bombing.

The day fox news called

One day shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Hassan Ali answered the door to his family home in Baghdad. Some strange men were standing on the doorstep. "I'd never seen anything like these huge armed men in flak jackets. They were scary. My father was worried they were going to kill us." The men turned out to be bodyguards for a Fox News crew, come to interview Ali and the other four members of his band UTN1.

Fox News weren't the first or last western journalists to visit. During 2003, wave after wave of advancing media troops from Britain and the US fell on UTN1, each one withdrawing in triumph with the same putatively sweet story. In the middle of the unremitting bleakness of war, here was comforting, upbeat news about five cute guys who, inspired by Boyzone and Westlife, had firmed their abs, modulated their harmonies and followed a career path comprehensible to us in the west: they had formed a boy band.

It was an irresistible story. UTN1 wore singlets - like Take That! They pouted broodingly for the cameras - like Ronan Keating! They sang in English and wore Converse! They crooned about peace, rather than detonating themselves at army checkpoints!

Better yet, somehow these plucky guys had managed to imbibe western popular culture (meaning the Spice Girls, Boys to Men and, just possibly, Blue). They were a multicultural melange of Muslims and Christians, Sunnis and Shias - thus pointing the way to the fine democratic future that Bush and Blair said Iraq would enjoy as soon as the west had won. In a marvellous piece of cultural imperialism, the west wrote up these five men - Shant Garabedian (30), Akhlad Raof (28), Artin Haroutiounian (31), Hassan Ali (26) and Nadeem Hamid (26) - as Iraq's only boy band, and a symbol of the country's bright post-war future.

The story suggested Iraqis wanted to be like us; and, more, that our invasion was to liberate people like us from people - devils, really - who weren't.

Iraqi culture thus apparently consisted of citadels of western-facing music and art in an otherwise toxic wasteland. Iraq had one boy band. It also had just one heavy metal band, we learned, called Acrassicauda, who had a similar tale of battling Saddam's censorship to hear the inspirational tones of Metallica and Napalm Death. If only western journalists had dug deeper, they might have found Eminem's spiritual brother in Mosul, Iraq's answer to Tracey Emin in Basra and an underground network of Harry Potter nuts extending from Kurdistan to the Gulf.

Only one problem with UTN1's story as it appeared in the west. It wasn't true. "We weren't a boy band," says Hassan, who is UTN1's guitarist and singer. "That was just a handle for the western media."

"We formed just before the millennium," recalls keyboardist Haroutiounian. "We wanted to do something unique in the Arab-speaking world: writing and performing our own songs in English." Their ambitions were written into the band's name: UTN1 stands for Unknown to No One. "We were very influenced by Boyzone and Westlife. I was fascinated by the Spice Girls."

Why, for the love of Mel C, why? " We liked the harmonies of singing together in these groups. Each singer had a different line," says Garabedian. "In Arabic music there is no such harmonising group singing; it's usually just one vocalist. We really wanted to do what they did, but with our twist. Yes, we were inspired by western pop music, but that was never all we were."

How did UTN1 feel about being made into poster boys for the liberation of Iraq? "The media interest was an opportunity for us at the precise moment when there were no other opportunities for us as musicians and the future for musicians in Baghdad looked - as it has indeed proved to be - very bleak," says Hamid. "We didn't see ourselves as poster boys: we saw ourselves as musicians struggling to carry on our careers in very difficult circumstances."

But the band had previous in pursuing dubious-seeming opportunities. They once wrote a song celebrating Saddam Hussein's birthday; it was commissioned by a radio station run by his son Uday. It's not entirely clear to me whether they were exploiting or exploited. "Let me explain how that happened," says Artin Haroutiounian with a grin. "We wanted to be the next U2, and we thought it was possible if we sang in English." So the band wrote a love song that they wanted broadcast on the Voice of Youth, an English-language radio station in Baghdad.

VoY agreed to play the song, but on one condition: UTN1 would have to write another commemorating the birthday of Saddam.

"We wrote the song in three days!" says Raof. All five chuckle over this memory as if it were just one of those crazy things one has to do in showbiz, like Take That wearing nipple-gaping tops to titillate pre-pubescent girls in the early 1990s. Didn't you have qualms? "We wanted our record played," says Haroutiounian, staring me down. Their song included the following lines: "All bells let them ring/ As we all will sing/ Long live dear Saddam." "They told us we had to use the word 'Saddam'. Otherwise we probably wouldn't," Haroutiounian says. VoY played it incessantly, but only spun their love song once.

UTN1 went on to make an album of songs in English, funded by Alan's Melody, the only shop selling imported CDs in the Iraqi capital. Ali says: "In Saddam's Iraq there was no satellite TV, no internet, not much access to the outside world, so [the shop's] influence was vital."

They sent copies of their CD to record companies in London, says Haroutiounian. "It is a capital of the musical world and we wanted to go there." But it wasn't to be. It was now late 2003 and the dictator whose birthday UTN1 had been obliged to celebrate in song had been swept from power and their homeland was being razed. "None of us had passports and getting new ones in wartime was impossible. It would have taken a year and a half."

As a result, the boys contemplated giving up music. Handily, while working for an import-export company, Garabedian met an American businessman called Larry Underwood whose Laudes Corporation was operating in post-Saddam Iraq. After hearing the CD, Underwood, who saw commercial possibilities of Iraq's first ever international pop group, decided to invest in them and so arranged for his new charges to go to Jordan. Once in Amman, the members of UTN1 successfully applied for a UK visa at the British embassy. As a result, they spent seven months in London in 2005 and 2006, learning to dance, sing and finesse the buffing of their six packs in the manner deemed requisite by UK style gurus. "It is a great city and we want to go back there sometime," says Haroutiounian. "Yes," agrees Raof, "we never did go on the London Eye."

Seemingly UTN1, funded by an American and groomed by Brits, was being moulded to became even more western than before. Ali, who not only plays guitar, but also oud on some UTN1 tracks, denies this: "Yes, we perfected that kind of boy-band style, but our Iraqi identity is clearly in the music." The band also uses the joza, a violin-like instrument which Hassan describes as having "its own special scale of sadness". You can hear it on their first single called While We Can. In the song's video (available on YouTube), children carry wooden guns which they symbolically drop at the end. "It is about stopping war," says Haroutiounian. "That is what we believe in."

Once their UK visas ran out, UTN1 settled in Beirut. Why the Lebanese capital? "It is impossible to make music in Baghdad. We are musicians, so we are in Beirut," says Hamid. "If we were freedom fighters, we would be in Baghdad."

Only one problem: they moved to Beirut in 2006, shortly before the Israeli-Lebanon war broke out. "War seems to follow us," says Haroutiounian. UTN1 withdrew to Amman, returning to Beirut only after hostilities ceased.

They remain exiles in Lebanon. Do you want to go home? "We go back to Baghdad occasionally," says Hamid, "and we would like to play a concert there, but it is not clear whether that would be too risky. As for living there - yes, perhaps, sometime, though who knows when?"

What do your families make of your chosen careers? "When we started some of them thought it was crazy for us to try to make our livelihoods in music. It just didn't happen. But now we're successful, we hear less of this," says Ali. All five prefer not to discuss their families who still live in Baghdad.

"One day," says Raof, "we hope to return to Baghdad. We want to set up a music school there, or a music store, or do something for our homeland. Iraq has too little music these days. We have been away for too long and we have so much to give back."

We're sitting in the new offices of UTN1's management company in central Beirut. From the fourth floor window one can see not just the Mediterranean, but also gridlock reportedly caused by a Hezbollah rally. Outside a muezzin is vying with the jackhammers and construction cranes as he summons the faithful to prayer at the Al-Omari Mosque. Beirut's city centre is being rebuilt. Only in Shanghai have I been more overwhelmed by the omnipresent sound of construction. This, I say, to UTN1, is what Baghdad will sound like in a happier time. All five giggle obligingly but none comments.

Instead, they tell me about their latest career move. Last year they decided to start singing in Arabic, recording a single called Jamila, which means beautiful. "It was number one across the Middle East," says Haroutiounian proudly. Why was it a success? "Because we sang Arabic but with western-style harmonies. There is nothing like it in the world. It blew people's minds." It did too: if you consult UTN1's MySpace page, you'll find encomia from around the world.

Hassan Ali tells me they have already recorded an album of six English and six Arabic songs and their management is waiting for the right time to release it. "Our hope is to heal the wounds between east and west, to spread a message of reconciliation."

Are you a political band? All five shake their heads. "We always wanted to show that something good can come out of Iraq," says Haroutiounian. "We are three Muslims and two Christians. We show how things are changing in Iraq." I notice that on the band's MySpace page, Nadeem cites Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East as one of his favourite books. "I will remove that reference. I am not sure that I trust his politics, having now finished the book."

Are you happy the British are leaving? "We're glad that the withdrawal shows that Iraqi police and soldiers can now look after their own country," says Hamid.

What would you be doing if you weren't successful in music? "I have a qualification in agriculture so I would be a farmer," says Garabedian. "I have a degree in chemistry, so I would be working for a corporation," says Ali. "I would be a porn star," says Haroutiounian who, I think, isn't taking my question seriously. "I would be his assistant," says Raof. "I studied biology," says Hamid, "but I don't see myself in a lab coat."

It's all smiles until Hamid adds: "Actually your question is impossible. None of us can imagine what we would have done. It's hard enough to know what you'll be doing in two weeks' time if you're an Iraqi. It's too dangerous to imagine the future. Hassan couldn't have been an industrial chemist because for him to step outside his house in Baghdad would have been suicide. Shant couldn't farm - it would have been too dangerous. And Art is Armenian so he would have been abducted by some sect. Normal dreams weren't available to us."

anatomy of murder: a history of genocide

What happened in 1994?


Between April and June an estimated 800,000 people – 10% of the population – were slaughtered in an orgy of killing that lasted for about 100 days.


Most of those killed were members of the smaller but traditionally dominant Tutsi ethnic group, while most of those who carried out the murders were from the majority Hutu population. Around 2 million Hutus fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then known as Zaire.


Who are the Tutsis and Hutus?


Both are native to central Africa, mainly Rwanda and Burundi. They have much in common, notably language and many traditions, and inter-marriage between the tribes was common.


However, tensions between them increased markedly with colonisation. Influenced by then popular ideas of eugenics, the Germans, who took over the country at the end of the 19th century and were followed by Belgium in 1916, saw the Tutsis as more closely resembling Europeans in appearance, notably through their longer noses, and thus considered them to be an elite.


The Belgians formalised this divide with separate identity cards based on ethnicity, and the Tutsis received decades of favour in education and employment.


What was the effect of these tensions?


In 1959, more than 20,000 Tutsis were killed in a series of riots and others fled to neighbouring countries. The larger Hutu population took over power when Belgium granted the country independence in 1962, and for decades the previously dominated Tutsis were semi-officially demonised.


In the years before the genocide, Tutsi refugees in Uganda formed a group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF. This aimed to overthrow Rwanda's Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, and engineer a return to their home country.


Facing economic hardship and growing unpopularity, the president used increasingly divisive rhetoric to claim that Tutsis in Rwanda - as well as moderate Hutus who supported the RPF - were collaborating with the group. The government and RPF signed a peace deal in August 1993, but this did little to ease tensions.


What was the catalyst for the killings?


On 6 April 1994, a private jet carrying Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamiram - also a Hutu - was shot down as it prepared to land in the Rwandan capital, Kigale. The perpetrators remain unknown, but the effect was immediate - Habyarimana's presidential guard immediately began murdering opposition leaders, and the massacre soon spread to Tutsis and moderate Hutus.


What happened then?


Within hours, the violence moved swiftly from the capital to the countryside. Encouraged by anti-Tutsi propaganda, tens of thousands of members of an unofficial militia group, the Interahamwe - meaning "those who stand together" - was mobilised to carry out massacres.


The killing soon became systematic, with Hutu civilians encouraged by the army and officials to turn on their Tutsi neighbours. Many people were killed after being stopped at roadblocks, while others were massacred in groups after hiding in churches or other buildings.


Most people were hacked with machetes, while others were shot. The mass killing only stopped when the RPF, which launched a new military assault after Habyarimana was killed, captured Kigali and the government collapsed.


What was the international response?


It was minimal. The bulk of the 2,500 UN peacekeepers in Rwanda at the time were withdrawn after 10 Belgian UN troops were killed a day after the plane crash in which Habyarimana died.


Individual countries also did nothing, with many saying later they had no idea that the situation was so bad while the massacre was taking place. In 2004, intelligence reports obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act showed that the then US president, Bill Clinton, and his cabinet were almost certainly told about a "final solution" to eliminate the Tutsi population in the early days of the killing.


In 2000 the UN security council accepted responsibility for failing to prevent the genocide. A week earlier, Belgium's then prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, made a public apology for his country's failings.


What has been the judicial response?


Soon after the genocide ended, the UN set up the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Tanzania, specifically to try alleged crimes during 1994.


It currently has 63 detainees in its care, 27 of whom are currently on trial. Trials have also taken place in other countries, notably Belgium, where those convicted included two Benedictine nuns who helped killed Tutsis sheltering at their convent.

If Tutsies died it was because the people were angry with them.

It was just a few weeks after Rwanda's genocide was finally brought to an end. The survivors were struggling to discover the fate of husbands, wives and children. New mass graves were being discovered by the day. A shocked world was wondering how, without lifting a finger to help the victims, it had allowed 800,000 Tutsis to be butchered in just 100 days, in one of the most extensive mobilisations of a population against its fellow citizens ever seen.

But the man behind the mass slaughter, Theoneste Bagosora, was in an unapologetic and belligerent mood. The former colonel who, as chief of staff in Rwanda's defence ministry, organised the militias that led the slaughter in 1994, and who sent the army in to start the killing, had fled in to exile a few miles across the border with Zaire.

Perched on his chair, a satellite phone at his side and flashing gold jewellery, he looked across to the hills of Rwanda and imparted two messages that seemed to be at odds with each other.

There had been no genocide, just a spontaneous bloodletting the Tutsis brought on themselves, he said. And the killing was not over - he intended to fight his way back to Rwanda and finish off the Tutsis once and for all.

"People say Bagosora did this or that, that I have the blood of the Tutsis on my hands. But where are all these people who were killed? If they died it is because they are rebels, or because the people were angry with them," he said. "But it's true the Tutsis are trouble. They have taken over a Hutu country. We will fight them again until all the Tutsis are gone."

Bagosora was a frightening figure who seemed even more sinister when he smiled. He might have been mistaken for some lowly civil servant in different circumstances. But as he sat in the camp established by Rwanda's defeated Hutu army inside Zaire there was no doubt he was the real authority among the troops.

His claim that there was no genocide has been espoused in the years since by the killers and their apologists, who have sought to blame the victims for their own murder by regurgitating a history of oppression by Tutsis before most of the dead were even born.

The International Tribunal for Rwanda established that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was neither accidental nor spontaneous. The trial laid bare Bagosora's central role in mobilising the army and the militia he created, the Interahamwe, to exterminate Tutsis.

"He was the man in control, hands down, no dispute," said one of the prosecutors, Barbara Mulvaney.

At the beginning of the 1990s, Rwandan politics had polarised under the twin pressures of foreign demands for an end to the one-party state and the introduction of multi-party democracy, and an invasion by Rwandan Tutsi rebels, who had grown up in exile in neighbouring Uganda.

President Juvenal Habyarimana bowed to demands for greater political freedom and a bunch of new parties promptly sprang up, including some that were militantly anti-Tutsi. At the same time Habyarimana was under pressure from moderate Hutus in his government, and foreign powers, to negotiate with the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who seized large parts of northern Rwanda.

Bagosora and an alliance of Hutu extremists responded by establishing a militia, the Interahamwe - "We Who Work Together" - with hatred of Tutsis as their central ideology. The Hutu 10 commandments appeared, calling on people to "stand firm and vigilant against their common enemy: the Tutsi", and demanding that Tutsis be barred from working in politics, government or the military.

The 8th commandment said: "Hutu must stop taking pity on the Tutsi."

A radio station sprang up, full of voices denouncing Tutsis as less than human, as devils, prompting periodic massacres in the early 1990s. Bagosora was at the centre of it all. He ordered lists of "enemies" to be drawn up. They would be the first to be murdered later on.

Those who stood in his way were threatened, including his boss, the moderate defence minister, James Gasana. Gasana attempted to disarm the militias; Bagosora threatened to kill him and the minister fled with this family to Italy. The new defence minister, Augustin Bizimana, enthusiastically carried on arming the Interahamwe.

In early April 1994, a Belgian colonel with the UN, Luc Marshal, reported that Bagosora had told him that the only way to solve Rwanda's problems would be to exterminate the Tutsis.

The dam broke a few days later when Habyarimana bowed to international pressure and flew to Tanzania to finalise a peace agreement that would include the rebel RPF in the government and integrate them into the Rwandan army.

"Habyarimana was flying back to implement the deal," said Mulvaney, the ITR prosecutor. "If that plane had landed, Bagosora would have lost his house, his job, his position. That's on a very personal level. But he would also have had to demobilise his forces in the army and integrate them with the RPF. They felt Habyarimana had capitulated, and Bagosora wanted to stop him."

Habyarimana's plane was hit by two missiles as it came in to land at Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

"It was the catalyst to start the killing," said Mulvaney. "Bagosora needed a big event to mobilise people, to spark the bloodlust. Habyarimana was seen by the people as 'papa'. That's why they shot down his plane."

The killing started almost immediately, beginning with those on the death lists. They included Boniface Ngulinzira, the Rwandan foreign minister who negotiated the peace deal with the RPF, as well as other cabinet ministers.

Bagosora called a meeting of military officers and invited the UN commander in Rwanda, a Canadian lieutenant general, Romeo Dallaire, to attend. Dallaire later described meeting Bagosora as like "shaking hands with the devil".

The UN commander quickly came to the conclusion that Bagosora was leading a coup, and insisted that, despite Habyarimana's death, there was still a civilian government in place under the moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana.

Hours later, Bagosora dispatched the presidential guard to murder the prime minister. She was sexually violated with a soft drink bottle before being killed, along with her husband. Ten Belgian peacekeepers who were guarding her were disarmed, tortured and murdered over the course of several hours. Their bodies were cut into so many pieces that when Dallaire first saw them he could not make out how many soldiers he was looking at. Bagosora later admitted in court to being at the scene during the killings, but said he had been powerless to stop the slaughter.

The intent was to drive the UN out, and it worked. The Americans and British pressed the UN security council to withdraw the peacekeepers. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were abandoned.

Bagosora handpicked a new government led by a president, Théodore Sindikubwabo, and prime minister, Jean Kambanda, who toured the country urging on the killers, as the slaughter spread. Tens of thousands who sought refuge in churches and stadiums were shot dead or butchered with machetes. Others were hunted down in banana groves, or burnt alive in their homes.

One witness told the international tribunal he saw Bagosora give a speech to the Interahamwe urging them "to be courageous in their work", a widely used euphemism for killing during the genocide.

Dallaire last saw Bagosora in July 1994, shortly before he fled to Zaire. Bagosora said he would shoot the UN commander if he saw him again. "I was threatened with a pistol [by Bagosora] and was told that next time he will kill me," said Dallaire.

Bagosora's dream of reconquering Rwanda fell apart and he fled to Cameroon, where he was arrested in 1996 and sent to the international tribunal.

In court, he continued to threaten those he regarded as his enemies, including Mulvaney as she laid out the prosecution case. "He even threatened to kill me in the courtroom. It's hard to understand how one human being can do this to another. But I can tell you he's chilling, he's a chilling man," she said.

Chris McGreal,

'Enemies of humanity' jailed for war crimes

The man accused of masterminding the 1994 Rwanda genocide, Theoneste Bagosora, was jailed for life by an international court yesterday as prosecutors described his conviction as the most significant since Nuremberg.

Bagosora, 67, a former colonel who was the chief of staff in Rwanda's defence ministry, was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes at the end of a five-year trial after judges found that he used the military and an extremist Hutu militia to kickstart the massacre of about 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

The international criminal tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Tanzania, also found Bagosora guilty of responsibility for overseeing individual massacres as well as the murder of Rwanda's prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers, which prompted the UN to withdraw most of its forces and abandon the Tutsi population to be slaughtered. Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda, who called Bagosora the "kingpin" behind the genocide, described meeting him as like "shaking hands with the devil".

But the court did not convict Bagosora on the broader charge of conspiracy to commit genocide before the killing, saying that while he created, armed and trained the militia that carried out the massacres and headed an "enemy commission" that vilified Tutsis, that did not demonstrate that he had planned the extermination from the beginning.

"The chamber certainly accepts that there are indications which may be construed as evidence of a plan to commit genocide, in particular when viewed in light of the subsequent targeted and speedy killings immediately after the shooting down [of President Juvénal Habyarimana's plane which unleashed the genocide]," the judgment said. But the tribunal said these preparations were in the context of a war with Tutsi rebels and could not be said beyond doubt to be solely preparations to exterminate civilians.

Once the killings began, the tribunal found that Bagosora was the highest authority in the defence ministry and oversaw control of the military as it murdered opponents and kickstarted the genocide. The court said the killings "formed part of an organised military operation pursuant to orders from superior military authorities". Bagosora said nothing as the verdict was delivered.

Two other army officers on trial with Bagosora, Aloys Ntabakuze and Anatole Nsengiyumva, were also given life sentences for genocide. Prosecutors called them "enemies of the human race". A fourth defendant, Gratien Kabiligi, the former chief of military operations, was acquitted of all charges and released.

Barbara Mulvaney, the lead prosecutor, described the verdicts as historic. "I think it's one of the most important verdicts ever because the body of work, in documents in black and white, in transcripts, in video tapes, lays out the planning and organisation of a genocide," she said. "And it's important to the Rwandan people because it finally puts to rest the claims by some people ... who still deny there was a genocide or deny that it was planned. No one can claim that any more."

But the relevance of the tribunal has been diminished in Rwanda by lengthy trials held outside the country. None of the Hutu leaders on trial have apologised for their role in the genocide, raising fears among some Tutsis that it could happen again.

Foreign Office advises Britons not to buy Israeli settlement properties

British citizens are to be formally advised by the government not to buy property in settlements in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, a move that marks a proactive shift of its position on a core issue of the Middle East conflict.

The advice, to be posted on the Foreign Office (FCO) website in the next 48 hours, will warn explicitly that potential purchasers of property in a settlement should consider that a future peace agreement "could have consequences for that property", FCO officials confirmed last night.

The government has long insisted that settlements beyond the pre-1967 war "green line" border, including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights — both of which have been annexed by Israel — are illegal.

But it has never before linked this to purchase of property. Officials insist there is no change of policy but say that by spelling out the advice they are underlining the urgency and sensitivity of the issue.

The move follows a meeting on Monday between Gordon Brown and the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad. On Tuesday Brown also met Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister.

The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, said: "This is a dramatic change of policy by Great Britain. They have gone a long way in being critical of Israel's policies. In the past they have talked about settlement being an obstacle to peace and so on. But this is a milestone. They are now being proactive and very serious."

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said: "If this is true it is highly disappointing in the light of the successful visit paid by Prime Minister Olmert to the UK during which he held frank and detailed discussion of the measures Israel is willing to take to advance the peace process with the Palestinians."

Brown told Fayyad in a letter dated 9 December and seen by the Guardian: "We have long expressed our opposition to settlement activity. But that activity has continued and has accelerated since the Annapolis process was launched. I share your frustration at this. The UK is now looking at what effective action we can take to discourage settlement expansion.

"Given our clear position on settlements it follows that we would not want any British national to purchase property inside an illegal settlement."

Settler violence is also causing concern. The Israeli government depicts violent settlers as aberrant citizens engaged in rogue behaviour. But a report released yesterday by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says these ultranationalists have been encouraged by the state to take over Palestinian land and natural resources.

"Settler violence is not random criminal activity; in most cases it is ideology-driven, organised violence, the goal of which is to assert settler dominance in the area," the report on settler violence says.

Settlers have increasingly been mobilising in groups, sometimes of up to 100 people, and targeting Palestinians as young as eight and as elderly as 95, the report continues. OCHA's tally of settler violence is not comprehensive but it shows that in 2006 there were 182 attacks, with 243 in 2007 and 290 in the first 10 months of 2008.

While the number of attacks against settlers is much lower, OCHA says that in 2006 Palestinians killed 10 settlers while settlers killed four Palestinians.

In a draft warning to Britons about buying settlement properties, the FCO states: "Potential purchasers should be aware that a future peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and Syria could have consequences for the property they purchased." The nearest precedent is a warning to UK citizens about the risks of buying property in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus.

For the last few years real estate fairs in London and Manchester have advertised properties for sale in Israeli settlements such as Maale Adumim and Har Homa, both in the West Bank.

"The risks to someone purchasing property in a settlement could go as far as aiding and abetting a grave breach of the Geneva convention – outlawing extensive appropriation of property not justified by military necessity," said Daniel Machover, a lawyer and expert on the issue.

Britain is seeking ways to keep alive hopes of a two-state solution to the conflict despite uncertainty over the outcome of the Israel elections, the split between the Palestinian authority in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the interregnum between US administrations.

On another front, Britain has been taking a leading role in persuading the EU to label products made in settlements in the West Bank, some of which have been using false addresses within Israel proper

Ian Black Toni O'Loughlin

Rosy rewriting of the Iraq debacle will fuel worse disaster in Afghanistan

An inquest into Blair's support for the invasion could fit on a postcard. Eager inquirers should turn their gaze to Kabul

Now they want to bolt the stable door. With British troops at last due to leave Iraq next spring, everyone is for a public inquiry. That is fine. But what about an inquiry into where they are going, straight from the frying pan into the fire, from Iraq to Afghanistan? In Basra the British army had at least a tattered remnant of a war plan. In Helmand the only plan is to be target practice for the Taliban.

The Iraq inquest can be written on a postcard. A British force was sent on the false claim by Tony Blair that Iraq was a threat to Britain. How this made sense was never explained, despite the efforts of Alastair Campbell and his colleagues. It has since emerged that Blair simply could not bring himself to desert the American president, George Bush. That in a nutshell is why 178 British servicemen and women have died in Iraq.

The conduct of the war saw British troops at their professional best. They did not bomb villages, wear lavish armour, or smash their way into women's bedrooms as did the Americans. They were good at hearts and minds. But as months stretched into years, they proved unable to build local leadership and were handicapped by the incompetence and corruption of the Pentagon's provisional executive in Baghdad.

By 2005 they had all but lost control of Basra to local militias. When these started feuding, the British retreated to the airport, leaving Iraqi units (with American help) to achieve an exhausted peace. After five years, Britain has not reconstructed Basra or given it prosperity and stable government as promised. As for finding Blair's weapons of mass destruction, forget it.

The British army commander, General Sir Mike Jackson, said two years ago that the army's best hope in Basra was "withdrawal with honour". That realistic assessment has just about been realised, but it was refreshing yesterday to hear the Archbishop of Canterbury apply one simple word to the Iraq war: "wrong".

The greatest honour Britain could pay the dead of Iraq is to inquire into why any more should die in Afghanistan. Why wait for the same number of soldiers to be killed (already 134)? Why wait for the same multiple of civilian deaths, the same villages bombed, the same infrastructure destroyed? Why wait for the same bombast to die down and truth-telling and realism to gain the upper hand? Why tip another billion pounds into this craziness, billions that we can ill afford?

British diplomats and military experts returning from Kabul have three performance modes. In public they declare Afghanistan to be tough but winnable. In private they admit it is getting worse not better, but might turn round in a decade if only the Afghans were less corrupt. In totally secret mode, their eyes turn to the sky and they declare the whole business a "total effing disaster".

Which mode is ever communicated to Gordon Brown? He has recently returned from Helmand, where he won plaudits for bravely standing without body armour in a British fort. Nobody asked why it should be brave to stand where Britain has supposedly won hearts and minds for two years - if not seven - and why he could not go anywhere by road. Brown is to be commended for supporting the professionalism and courage of British soldiers, but he owes them more than words. He owes them brutal honesty in reviewing the political and strategic purpose that is now so costly of that courage.

Unless he is enveloped in sycophants, Brown must be hearing the same intelligence as the rest of us hear and read. Hapless spin doctors can point to schools built here, poppies eradicated there, soldiers "trained" somewhere else. But Kabul is ever more insecure and journeys out of the capital are confined to armoured cars or helicopters.

Monday's remarkable report from inside the Taliban by the Guardian's Ghaith Abdul-Ahad showed his hosts clearly able to roam free through 70% of populated Afghanistan, collecting tribute and dispensing favours and rough justice. Taliban units appear to control the Khyber Pass, forcing all supplies into costly convoys. It can only be a matter of time before they acquire the ground-to-air missiles that enabled them to drive out the Russians in the 1980s. British soldiers dying by the week within miles of their Helmand base indicate the failure of a military campaign launched with such bravado two years ago.

Brown's repeated thesis that the occupation of Helmand is vital "to keep terror from the streets of Britain" is nonsense. It fuels an insurgency that sucks guns, money and recruits into this benighted region. Arrested terrorists in Britain may be lying when they invariably cite the war as their rallying cry, but cite it they do. Brown cannot plausibly cite the antithesis, that they are being deterred by the war in Helmand.

As for blaming Pakistan, its regime has been thoroughly corrupted by American aid for a decade and its border with Afghanistan is beyond policing. Earlier this week, Brown registered his "disgust and horror" at the Taliban insurgency using suicide bombers against British troops. This outrage is hardly novel. Child bombers have been used by insurgents since the Vietcong in Vietnam.

What Brown failed to acknowledge, and what is used by Britain's enemies in Pakistan and elsewhere, is Nato's use of cluster bombs and aerial missiles, knowing that they kill civilians, including children, "collaterally". The coalition has almost certainly killed more children in Afghanistan by its reckless use of tactical air strikes than have died at the hands of the Taliban. War is no place for such hypocrisy.

Nato forces in Kabul are now devoid of strategy. The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, is proving adept at the old Afghan game of shuffling warlords and druglords. It is common knowledge that lines of contact are opening on every front with commanders of the "new Taliban", whose role in governing a future Afghanistan is beyond dispute. This leaves Nato's leaders - other than America and Britain - justifiably refusing to throw good troops after dead ones. Afghanistan is proving a classic of sunk cost fallacy, with commanders unwilling to change policy for fear of admitting that the existing one has been a colossal failure.

Frankness continues to be the greatest casualty of these wars. Those who cheered on Iraq and Afghanistan - from left as well as right - dare not admit they might have been wrong. Now a rewriting of the Iraq epilogue as a mission well accomplished is acting as a lethal magnet, drawing British policy to similar disaster and British troops to their deaths in Helmand.

The essence of moral judgment is universality. Eager inquirers should now be turning their gaze to the dusty heights of Kabul. Brown may be relying on the army's spirit of "their's not to reason why; their's but to do or die". That is a soldier's duty, but it is not the duty of a democrat. His duty is precisely to reason why.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Critique of 'PlaneStupid' activism

Plane Stupid's activists train in protest techniques, such as padlocking themselves to things, so as she sat on the ground near Stansted's runway, Rosie Slay was not overly concerned for her safety, despite the bicycle D-lock attaching her to a fence by the throat. Safety is always a big consideration during the group's actions, she says.

The police had arrived shortly after the protesters, and were removing them one by one from their makeshift barricade, cutting some loose with bolt cutters. It still took more than two hours, to the demonstrators' delight, though Slay didn't delay the officers for as long as she had hoped - the police found the key to her lock on the grass.

Five days after the daring 3am action that shut down one of London's airports, cancelled 52 flights, disrupted thousands of passengers, amassed huge international publicity and prevented the equivalent damage, by Greenpeace's estimate, of 2,162 tonnes of CO2, the young activists of Plane Stupid have been reflecting on what they consider as the enormous success of their intervention.

"We were really, really happy as we were getting arrested," says Slay, 20, a student originally from Hackney, east London. "We had people on the phones talking to the media and as we got more and more information about the amount of coverage, we were really elated."

Coverage of Monday's protest, and the curiously polite radicals who staged it, has focused on their backgrounds as "toffee-nosed youngsters", a collection of supposedly spoiled rich kids with more time than insight.

Still essentially a student movement, there is no question that like most university campuses, Plane Stupid is more white and more middle class than the national demographic.

But the most striking common characteristic of those who took part in the protest is their unwavering conviction, which is compelling.

Josh Moos, who like Slay is a student at Sussex University, is at 21 almost an elder statesman of the group, having been involved with the campaign since shortly after it was set up three years ago. He used to be "an armchair environmentalist", he says, but "I realised from further reading that climate change is the most pressing issue of our time. All further issues are of course important but they all become subjugated to the issue of climate change."

His unofficial role during the runway occupation was to reassure the newer campaigners. The group also provides training in techniques for resisting arrest, media skills and advice on how to deal with your parents.

In total, 54 people were arrested on the taxiway at Stansted, along with a further three as they attempted to leave. Dan Glass, one of the group's leading figures in Scotland, came south to participate with 14 other "affiliates" in Monday's action, but only two chose to get arrested on the runway. The rest preferred to keep their noses clean in anticipation of potential future protests at Glasgow and Edinburgh airports.

Last summer Glass, 25, hit the headlines after supergluing himself to Gordon Brown. He rejects the middle class tag, particularly when applied to those living in the poor Glasgow suburbs campaigning against the expansion of the city's airport: "Fifteen percent of the population never even fly, and many of them live in Clydebank, where they are really affected by Glasgow airport. In Scotland the demographic of people involved includes a lot of people who are really economically marginalised," he says.

While some have characterised the action as that of "militant environmentalists", the group argues that what is seen today as dangerously radical will one day be accepted. "We are definitely on the radical end of the spectrum and that is where we wish to be," says Moos. "Visionaries are initially seen as radical before the mainstream catches up with them and accepts their policies."

A legal time bomb in IraqObama must return US foreign policy to the rule of law - and the mandate for war is about to expire

Hillary Clinton's first task as US secretary of state will be to defuse the legal time-bomb that the Bush administration has set up in Iraq. Up to now, the military occupation has been authorised annually by the UN. But now the administration plans to let the UN mandate expire on December 31, and replace it with a new "status of forces agreement" recently approved by the Iraqi parliament.

But the Bush-Maliki agreement only covers American forces. Once the UN mandate expires, there is no longer a legal foundation for troops deployed by Britain and the other remaining allies. While Britain is planning to leave Iraq next year, it is seeking its own bilateral agreement for the interim. But time is running short. Most of the other allies are rushing for the exits, and with good reason. Any soldiers that remain on January 1 will be in the country illegally and will have no protection against prosecution in Iraqi courts. The "coalition of the willing" is coming to an ignoble end.

To top it off, the termination of the UN mandate will leave American troops without authority under US law to engage in ongoing combat. In granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq in 2002, Congress limited it to two purposes: to "defend the national security of the US from the threat posed by Iraq" and to "enforce all relevant UN security council resolutions".

The government of Iraq is no longer a threat to US national security, so the first clause no longer applies. Indeed, the Bush-Maliki agreement proclaims that "the danger posed to international peace and stability by the former Iraqi government is gone now". And once the UN authorisation expires, there will no longer be a relevant security council resolution to enforce. Since neither clause applies, the use of combat troops will become illegal on January 1.

The bilateral agreement with Iraq does not fill this legal hole. Bush has concluded the agreement on his own without giving Congress a chance to vote on it. The agreement is his and his alone. But the president does not have the power to wage war on his own.

Constitutionally, he needs Congress approval - which is precisely why he sought authorisation in 2002. When challenged on this matter at a congressional hearing, the administration representative, David Satterfield, was initially unable to give an answer. In a later written response, he cited Congress's 2002 authorisation - the very one that expires at the end of this year.

Satterfield also cited the resolution passed by Congress immediately after September 11, authorising the president to use force against the terrorists involved in these attacks. But the resolution was intended to endorse military action in Afghanistan, not Iraq. This was why the president had to return to Congress the next year to obtain explicit authorisation for the Iraqi invasion.

In a last-ditch effort, Satterfield pointed to Congress's decision to vote a supplemental appropriation for the war until June or July of next year. But the supreme court has held that appropriations are not the same thing as direct congressional enactments. If they were, a limited authorisation for military action, like the one Congress passed in 2002, would always become an open-ended commitment to unlimited war.

All this is typical of the Bush administration, whose cavalier treatment of the rule of law has embarrassed America. Its extreme unilateralism leaves the incoming administration in a difficult position. Technically speaking, it only comes into power on January 20. But Hillary Clinton shouldn't wait. She should immediately take steps to encourage the Maliki government to extend the terms of its agreement to Britain and any nation that wishes to remain. If she quietly puts the Obama administration behind this initiative, it is far more likely that Maliki will push for parliamentary approval.

Solving the legal problem in America is trickier. As a leading participant in the Senate debates, Clinton understands Satterfield's distortions. In fact, she was one of the first to demand that the Bush-Maliki agreement be submitted to Congress. She should continue pressuring the White House to take this step. If Bush persists to the bitter end, she should urge Obama to submit the Bush-Maliki agreement for congressional approval as soon as he takes office.

President Obama must return American foreign policy to the rule of law. It is time for him and Clinton to demonstrate that the era of illegal presidential unilateralism has come to an end.

• Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway are law professors at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively bruce.ackerman@yale.edu

Senators accuse Rumsfeld over abuse of detainees. Ed Pilkington in the Guardian

A US Senate committee has accused the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of being directly responsible for the abusive interrogations of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

After an 18-month investigation, the Senate's armed services committee concluded that Rumsfeld's approval of aggressive interrogation methods in December 2002 was a direct cause of abuses that began in Guantánamo and spread to Afghanistan and Iraq. They culminated in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003, where Iraqi detainees were found to have been forced into naked pyramids, sexually humiliated and threatened by dogs.

The Bush administration insisted the abuses had been the result of a few "bad apples" and that those responsible would be held accountable. The committee found neither those statements to be true.

"The abuses at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo [Guantánamo] and elsewhere cannot be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples," said the Democratic chair of the committee, Carl Levin. "Attempts by senior officials to portray that to be the case while shrugging off any responsibility are both unconscionable and false."

No other congressional report has pointed the finger of blame so squarely at Bush and his senior advisers.

In hearings in June and September, the committee heard testimony that allowed it to piece together the chronology of events leading up to the Abu Ghraib abuses. It focused its attentions on Sere, a training system used to prepare US soldiers for aggressive interrogations so that they might endure if captured overseas.

The techniques were never intended to be used by US interrogators against their detainees. But in February 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush determined that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to terror suspects.

Following that ruling, techniques used in Sere training were applied against US detainees, and Rumsfeld gave his approval that December

Verdict on a White wash (Harriet Wistrich in the Guardian)

When an innocent man going about his business is shot dead on a London tube, seven bullets pumped into his brain at near point-blank range, some would call it an execution. Others, though, claim it as a "lawful killing".

Thankfully, the jury at the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes rejected this interpretation. For three-and-a-half years his family members have patiently awaited their day in court, hoping that an inquest would finally deliver justice. By returning an open verdict yesterday the jurors went as far as they could after their hands were tied by the coroner.

Not only did he stop the jury giving an unlawful killing verdict, he also denied them an opportunity to spell out the reasons they found for Jean Charles's death. The only scope was a series of yes/no answers to apparently self-evident questions - yet the jurors could not decide whether the suicide attacks that preceded the shooting put pressure on the police. Further, they rejected much of the police version of events, including claims that officers shouted "armed police" before shooting. In that context, this is another damning indictment of the police.

What the jury above all refused to accept was the coroner's definition of a lawful killing: that it was more likely than not that the two police marksmen honestly, although mistakenly, believed that Jean Charles was a suicide bomber about to detonate a bomb. Jean Charles bore only a passing resemblance to the actual suspect, Hussain Osman; and his allegedly suspicious behaviour amounted to getting off a bus, seeing that the tube was closed and getting back on the bus while using his mobile phone. Even in the London of July 2005, on high alert after failed suicide bomb attacks, could such an appalling error be lawful?

The circumstances of Jean Charles's death have already been the subject of a number of reports and investigations by the police, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan Police Authority, but the only prosecution that arose was for breaches of health and safety legislation. His family wanted individual officers to be held criminally accountable. They believed an inquest would achieve truth and justice. Instead, the coroner has presided over a whitewash.

At least, for the first time, the family had the opportunity to ask testing questions of many officers, from senior commanders to those who fired the fatal shots. The evidence has exposed a catalogue of errors at every level of the operation, and we learned a great deal about how Jean Charles was killed.

There was sufficient evidence to enable the jurors to return an unlawful killing verdict - and the open verdict suggests they may well have done so, given the chance. And there was ample evidence for a narrative verdict to catalogue the series of police failings causing or contributing to Jean Charles's death.

This 10-week inquest has been a fairly thorough inquiry, yet on an unequal field. The family were represented by a team of two barristers and solicitors, compared with the 10 barristers and several solicitors representing the police. The five police teams, supposedly representing separate interests, in reality worked together. On each occasion that a significant fault was exposed by Michael Mansfield's cross-examination, up to five barristers for the police would seek to undermine what had been exposed. By the time it came to making legal submissions on verdicts, the police teams effectively carved up the terrain. The family sought to challenge the ruling. But when an emergency application to the high court failed, they instructed their legal team to withdraw from the inquest, outraged by the limits the coroner placed.

At the end of this entire process, no one has faced any kind of appropriate sanction. Not one police officer involved in the operation has been subjected to disciplinary action. The two most senior officers have been promoted.

The inquest heard that Jean Charles once praised the restraint of the British police and reassured his mother they were not like their trigger-happy Brazilian counterparts. Yet we now know that, only a day or so before the fatal shooting, Ian Blair, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, met the prime minister and discussed ways to secure legal immunity for firearms officers during a heightened terrorist alert. He needn't have bothered: the police have effective immunity from prosecution, as this case has illustrated. Where an innocent man is killed in the cause of protecting the public, no coroner will allow the police to be held accountable.

Yesterday, though, ordinary men and women gave their verdict - and it was the best one possible, given the severe restrictions. It gives the family new hope that British justice might be true to its reputation, and they will seek a judicial review.

• Harriet Wistrich is the solicitor for the De Menezes family, whose campaign website is www.justice4jean.org