You click up the paper and read a story about Gaza. About how 30 or so Palestinians died when their residential compound was shelled by the Israeli Defense Forces. Which story is pretty much par for the course and does not really penetrate your emotional armor.

Then you read down the next few paragraphs and they blast through the shell around your soul like a shaped charge:

Members of the Samouni family said that they were rounded up late Sunday night by Israeli soldiers and ordered to gather for their own safety in a single dwelling in the impoverished Zeitoun district of Gaza city, a Hamas stronghold. The next morning, they said, the building was shelled.

In its report on Friday, the United Nations agency confirmed the family’s account, saying that 110 people had been forced into the house on Sunday. “The next day the house was shelled,” Allegra Pacheco, an agency spokeswoman, told BBC television, quoting unidentified witnesses.

And it all comes back, the anger, the impotence and the burning sorrow that you first felt when you heard about the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla or saw the pictures of the cluster bombs falling in Lebanon.

A number of "respectable" commentators have said that the current war in Gaza is "designed to restore the honor of the IDF." Please, what language are they speaking?