Ghazi Filfil was planning a business trip to Germany this month. That was before an Israeli tank shell crashed into the top storey of his five-floor house one night last week, wounding him, his wife and all his nine children.

Even if he were not confined to a grimy ward of Gaza's Shifa hospital with a steel pin in his shattered right arm and a six-inch shrapnel wound across his shoulder, it is doubtful he would be travelling in the near future.