Lebanese women and children in a pick-up truck, fleeing from the southern village of Bint Jbeil.

As I write this, doctors in the Gaza Strip are telling me they are puzzled by the condition of the Palestinian dead. X-rays of the bodies of those strafed by the F-16 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters show no indication of shrapnel shards. Instead, limbs have been severed and corpses burned to a crisp.

I am told that there is no technology available to determine what has caused this. Even the wounded are making the desperately under-equipped medical staff scratch their heads. Their injuries are not responding to conventional treatment.

So far about 70 people, mainly innocent civilians, have died from mysterious missile blasts with more than 200 injured in what Israeli authorities have dubbed "Summer Rain," a military offensive launched against Gaza for the capture of a single Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit.

As I write this, smoke billows from a Shiite neighborhood near Beirut in Lebanon. About 50 have already died and hundreds more lie wounded. This is just the latest response to Hizbullah's attack on northern Israel in which several Israeli soldiers were killed and two taken into captivity.

With Gaza in the south and Lebanon in the north, Israel is burning like a cigar at both ends. Tragically, the ashes of that smoldering cigar are the innocent on all sides, the faceless collateral of chess games played by the regional warlords — Assad, Hizbullah, and Olmert.

While the Qassam rockets launched from Gaza are a primitive fizz-bang phenomenon born out of the abject hell of life in an open-air prison, Hizbullah's assault on northern Israel has been a far more calculated move. Denis Ross, the former US envoy to the Middle East, once criticized Palestinian President Yasser Arafat for being unable to make the transition from resistance fighter to political statesman.

Then there is the fact that Hizbullah's main sponsor (or conduit of arms), the Syrians, were chased ignominiously out of Lebanon by popular Lebanese sentiment after Rafiq Al-Hariri's assassination.

It is highly significant that Israeli fighter jets buzzed Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad while he was in bed in his Damascus palace. And it has to be noted that the Israelis have targeted only the Shiite in Lebanon, their bombing of the airport done because they felt Syrian arms had been landed there.

The Palestinians in Gaza, however, have not been granted the same "deference." The bombing of vital road links, power stations, and the indiscriminate damage to civil infrastructure (in flagrant violation of the Geneva Accords) speak of deliberate mayhem, vindictive vandalism, and premeditated terror.

The Israeli policy of collective punishment seen in the horrors of crop destruction, house demolition, and the denial of water supplies, foodstuff, electricity, and medicine has also witnessed scores of "administrative detainees" — mostly Hamas government officials — locked away indefinitely and silenced without recourse to legal representation or charges having been laid against them.

This time, unlike the past, when the Israeli administration tended to contemplate negotiations for prisoners, the hammer is down. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — a non-military politician and a shadow of Sharon — is under pressure to prove his political machismo.

And so, while John Bolton, President Bush's ambassador at the United Nations, conveniently fudges Qatar's proposed Security Council resolution against Israel on behalf the White House — and, as some allege, the Anti-Defamation League and American Israeli Public Affairs Committee — the unilateral Sharon plan hatched within Kadima transforms into the unheeded Olmert offensive.

Behind the protective skirts of Bush — a President who comedians say would happily bomb the Canary Islands to get rid of bird flu — the Israeli prime minister can now use the capture of a single soldier as a pretext to smash a "terrorist" government that has not only recently called off suicide bombings, but has also acknowledged the possibility of a two-state solution based upon the 1967 Green Line.

Following the deliberate dismembering of Hamas (some of whose rhetoric has probably become too uncomfortably dovish for Kadima's hawks) Olmert can lay the grounds for Israeli unilateralism and ensure, once and for all, that there will be "nobody" to talk to when he finally draws up the shrunken boundaries of a "final solution" Palestinian state.

The moral obscenity of this political project, combined with Israel's cavalier disregard for international law, is simply mind boggling. It is a shop-worn cliché, but one has to repeat it: no other state in modern history has been allowed to flagrantly dishonor international law with the monotonous regularity that Israel has.

Hamas, of course, sits on the horns of a massive dilemma. Israel's clarion cry that Hamas remains a "terrorist" organization as long as it refuses to recognize the state of Israel must now be a deafening roar in the ears of Ismail Haniyah in Gaza and Khalid Meshaal in Damascus.

To this effect, Dr. Robert Crane, a political analyst and former US ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, has inferred that Hamas is displaying the same kind of absolutist naivety that many believe has bedeviled Palestinian politics since 1917. He suggests, as many others are now doing, that Hamas needs to indulge in significant political nous through longer-term strategies.

In other words, Hamas has to vigorously call Israel's bluff. Its leaders will have to cross the proverbial Rubicon of realpolitik to finally recognize Israel. This it can do, suggest analysts, by recognizing the existence of Israel, but significantly allowing itself the dignity and space to seriously interrogate its moral fundamentals.

This is no different to what the African National Congress did with the apartheid government in South Africa. Besides, as Crane says, in international law the recognition of a particular government does not constitute approval, or even acknowledgement, that the particular country has a moral right to exist.

In other words, Hamas should acknowledge political reality and start bargaining, thus enabling international support for its government to be less conditional, and opening the way for concerted and focused international pressure on the Israelis to finally play the game according to the recognized rules of human decency.