A Palestinian woman is standing in her kitchen when she hears a deafening bang. Rushing to her living room she sees her family in pieces, spread across floors, walls and ceiling. The horror is total and meaningless. Nobody meant it to happen, so what was its cause? The tragedy in Gaza surely marks the time when the world declares air-launched bombs and long-distance shells to be illegal under the 1983 Geneva convention. They should be on a par with chemical munitions, white phosphorous, cluster bombs and delayed-action land mines. They pose a threat to non-combatants that should be intolerable even in the miserable context of war.

I can accept Israeli claims that they were not intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza. But the failure of

their chosen armaments had the same effect. Killing from the air need have no sight of the carnage they unleash. They are placed at both a geographical and a moral distance, with a licence allowed no soldier on the ground.

Whether they are dispatching free-fall bombs or GPS-guided missiles, tank shells or predator drones they know they often miss their targets, but they launder any carnage as “collateral damage” and leave politicians to handle the backlash. The soldier shrugs and walks away, with no obligation to humanity beyond the occasional apology and a reference to the other side being just as bad.

If gas, landmines, chemical weapons and cluster munitions are now banned — a ban broadly obeyed by most civilised armies — why not aerial bombardment? Instead, bombing is becoming ever more prevalent. It precedes any operation, as a sort of overture, and eagerly takes part in each tactical twist. Counter-insurgency war, in Iraq and Afghanistan, has seen western armies take heavy casualties. But such is the political aversion to them that Israeli, American and British ground forces operate under strict “force protection” rules to minimise losses. Rather than employ infantry to clear an apparently hostile settlement, commanders call in air strikes and pound it to rubble.

That human shield tactics may be involved is no excuse: the law does not permit the killing of innocents in the hope of reaching the guilty. The bombing of urban infrastructure is an act of terror, meant to weaken the resistance of victims and cause them to surrender. This was the case with the west’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and Baghdad in 2003, the latter under the openly terrorist rubric of “shock and awe”. Neither achieved the ambition proclaimed by the champions of air power, the British wartime air force chief Arthur “Bomber” Harris’s promise “to win the war from the air”.

In his book Shock of the Old, the science historian David Edgerton cites the bomber as the most overrated of all weapons of war. Glamorous, noisy, ostensibly sophisticated and easily marketed to “techno-dazzled” generals, it has proved an ineffective killing machine. In Vietnam, Serbia, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, those deploying bomber power constantly promised more than they could deliver. No weapon fired at a distance can be sure of its target. They numb moral sensibility and do harm beyond all justification of victory. They should be abolished. If we wish to kill other people for whatever reason, we should use only weapons that kill the right ones. —The Guardian