An elderly Palestinian woman reluctantly accepts aid in Gaza City. (Maan Images)

Hilmi Samouni still hopes at some point - "inshallah" - to go back to his old job as a kitchen assistant in the Palmyra, Gaza City's best known shwarma restaurant. But unlike his 22-year-old brother Khamiz, who is working once again in a car paint shop, and his 20-year-old cousin Mousa, on a two-year accountancy diploma course at Al Azhar University, Hilmi, who is 26, found that he couldn't cope when he returned to the Palmyra after the war. "Everyone there was very supportive," he says, "but I couldn't do good work." Unlike Mousa, who also lost his parents, and Khamiz, Hilmi saw the bodies not only of his father Talal and his mother Rahme but also of his wife Maha, age 20, and their only son, six-month-old Mohammed, among the 21 killed in the shelling of the warehouse in which they had been ordered by Israeli troops to gather. It still bothers Hilmi that he has no pictures of any of them; they were burnt when the family home was fired on the day before.

Now Hilmi mainly potters round the house, set amid devastated orchards and chicken coops in the southern Gaza City district of Zeitoun. The graffiti in English and Hebrew on the interior walls, left by the men of the Israeli army's Givati brigade, are the only relics of their two-week occupation of the building - a gravestone drawn beside the words "Gaza we were here"; "One down and 999,000 to go"; "Death to Arabs". Has the family deliberately kept the graffiti visible? "Yes, but anyway we didn't have paint to cover them," he says. One of Hilmi's duties is to help look after his dauntingly self-possessed 11-year-old sister Mona, who turns the pages of artwork inspired by her memories of the morning of 5 January 2009. "This is me cleaning the face of mother who is dead. This is my father who was hit in the head and his brains came out. This is my dead sister-in-law. This is my sister taking the son from my sister in law..."

The warehouse shelling commemorated in Mona's artwork was one of the worst of many attacks on civilians in Gaza by Israeli forces between 27 December and 18 January. The Israeli military offensive had been a long time coming but still the multiple Saturday-afternoon bombing raids with which it began came as a surprise. The stated purpose was to halt the rocket and mortar attacks - 470 of which had spread undoubted fear through the border communities of southern Israel since an Israeli raid on Hamas ended an uneasy but largely effective five-month ceasefire in early November 2008.

But if the timing was a surprise, the unprecedented ferocity of the onslaught on Hamas-controlled Gaza was even more so. More than two weeks into the war, the Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni would boast in a radio interview that "Israel... is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing". Whether, as Judge Richard Goldstone's UN-commissioned report on Operation Cast Lead charged, Israel "targeted" the civilian population, or whether, as some soldiers have since attested, the military simply subordinated the preservation of Palestinian lives to those of its own troops, the figures tell their own story of the extent to which "a country" went "wild". Though disputed by the military, exhaustive research by the respected Israeli human-rights agency B'Tselem put the total death toll at 1,387, of whom 773 were civilians. In the same period, four Israelis were killed in Israel by rocket fire, and nine soldiers in Gaza, four from friendly fire. Because the borders were closed, there was no flow of refugees out of Gaza of the sort that would have followed an equivalent onslaught elsewhere.

That early-morning bombardment of Wael Samouni's half-finished warehouse - where some 100 of his extended family, including his young relative Hilmi, had been sheltering - is one of more than 20 events being investigated by the Israeli military police. Last month, pointing out that so far only one soldier has faced trial over his conduct of the war - for stealing a Palestinian's credit card - B'Tselem complained that since the Army itself was doing its own investigating, any indictments would be directed only against "the lower echelon" and that an independent inquiry capable of attributing blame to "senior officers" and government policy-makers in the "political echelon" was needed.

Either way, there is no sign as yet of an investigation into a separate incident early the previous day, the first of the ground invasion. Israeli soldiers, their faces camouflaged in black, some with branches round their helmets, stormed into the house behind Hilmi's home, where his uncle, Atiya Samouni, a 46-year-old farmer, was taking refuge with his two wives and 15 children.

To read the full article please visit The Independent.