For four days Red Cross officials pressed the Israeli military for access to bomb-shattered homes in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City. Finally Israel promised safe passage with the help of a Red Cross rescue team and four ambulances from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. What they found exceeded their worst fears.

In one house they discovered four small children - alive but terrified, emaciated and too weak to stand – lying on mattresses next to 12 corpses including those of their mothers. In a second house they found three dead bodies. In a third they found 15 survivors of the Israeli bombardment, several of them wounded.

“I never expected to see such a horrifying scene. I never saw anything like it in my life,” Abed el-Aziz Abu Aisha, 22, told The Times. “It was like a very ugly scene from a horror movie.”

They had to drag the injured to the ambulances in a cart because barriers erected by the Israeli army made it impossible to bring the vehicles close enough. The rescuers evacuated 18 of the wounded and 12 others who were suffering from exhaustion. They took away two corpses and planned to return later to fetch 13 others.

The International Committee of the Red Cross did not mince its words. In an unusually blunt public statement yesterday it accused the Israeli military of “unacceptable” conduct and of breaching international humanitarian law. It demanded immediate access to the area to search for more wounded survivors sheltering in ruined houses.

“This is a shocking incident,” said Pierre Wettach, the ICRC’s head of delegation. “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”

Mr Aisha, the Palestinian Red Crescent worker, said the area was so devastated by the Israeli bombardment that he did not recognise it. He said the eight-man rescue team was taunted and threatened by Israeli soldiers as it brought out the survivors.

The wounds of the injured – some of them children – were putrefying, and the survivors were starving, parched and hysterical. “The scenes will be imprinted on my memory for ever,” Mr Aisha said.

In response the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) claimed that it was combating a terrorist organisation – Hamas – that was using civilians as human shields, and insisted that it was working closely with international aid organisations. “Any serious allegations made against the IDF’s conduct will need to be investigated properly, once such a complaint is received formally, within the constraints of the current military operation,” it stated.

Hours after the ICRC’s statement, Israel’s international standing suffered a second blow when the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) suspended its operations in Gaza because of the dangers posed by the Israeli offensive. The announcement came after a Palestinian employee was killed and two others were injured when a UNflagged convoy was hit by Israeli tank shells near the Erez crossing on Gaza’s northern border. The UN insisted that the Israelis had been told of the convoy’s movements. The IDF would not comment last night.

Earlier this week the Israeli military struck a UNrun school it claimed was used by Hamas fighters, killing more than 40 Palestinians. “Operations will remain suspended until Israeli authorities can guarantee the safety and security of our staff,” Christopher Gun-ness, an UNRWA spokesman, said.

UNRWA delivers relief supplies to 750,000 Gazans, and the suspension will deepen what international aid organisations describe as a humanitarian catastrophe in the territory.

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