Its not a retaliatory attack against a largely civilian population, its a retaliatory attack against Hamas who hides amongst a largely civilian population.
Firstly, even though Hamas are embedded in the civilian population, it's still a retaliatory attack against a civilian population. The semantics there don't change it. There is still both a moral and legal issue involved in deliberately targeting civilians.
Hamas deliberately targeted civilians and that's a war crime. Hamas should be tracked down and executed for that. It would be horribly hypocritical of me, or anyone else, to justify Israel doing that exact same thing. Israel believes that are justified because it's in retaliation to the Hamas attack, but Hamas believes they are justified because it's in retaliation to the illegal occupation. So where does it end? An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. Everyone thinks they are right. I don't see a problem with standing up for the civilians and saying I don't care if the attackers think they are justified or not, they are deliberately killing civilians and that's wrong.
And what choice do Israel have though??
They have the choice not to attack civilians.
If they dont try and completely eliminate Hamas there will be many more terror attacks in the future.
So, I'm happy to have a discussion, but I don't want to spend hours if we can't agree on the basic facts, so I'd rather address those first and see where we end up. This was basically my problem with shack's post too... he implied the terrorist attacks could be ended, which I took to mean exactly what you plainly stated: the complete elimination of Hamas.
What do you think the chances are that Hamas can be completely eliminated? I think it's 0%. So you really think it's realistically higher than that?
