Not to dispute your point, but do you have a source regarding Israeli actions killing 3x as many civilians as Hamas? This would be an important fact for updating my perspective if it's true.
I did a quick search for this. Seems like there's some controversy over the numbers, even though they've tried to back it with evidence. That's approaching 5x the official numbers of Israeli casualties, so even if its been inflated my 3x is probably already low and out of date.
Now you might take that figure with a grain of salt, I cannot verify it and wouldn't trust it at present. However, there are plenty of individual stories being reported by agencies I have enough trust in (and some of which I wish now I had not read). You can't accurately shell buildings in a densely built up city like Gaza. Israel told people to move, but there are credible reports that they then attacked people in transit, shelled an area near the south they'd asked people to move to and shelled a refugee camp.
I'm sure that in every case Israel will argue they had intelligence. But I don't think the families of those who see their kids killed in those strikes are going to care. They're just making the next angry generation by applying indiscriminate vengeful violence.
It’s comparing apples and oranges, since Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Many Palestinian casualties are Hamas’s fault, not IDF.
I'm sure their intentions are very different but it's dehumanising to say it's apples and oranges. Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are, and being collateral does not abdicate responsibility, and does not reduce the resulting anger. IDF does have a choice of tactics and they do appear to be using shelling on a dense civilian location while providing unrealistic opportunity to evacuate.
I think if a missile blew up my wedding and killed my family, and I found out it was because some bad guys were hiding among the guests, I'd still be pretty angry at the people who fired the missile no matter who they were aiming for.*
Experts who study the propagation of violence say that the currency of radicalism is grievance. The more grievances happen, the more support goes to violent extremists to strike back, even if this only results in more bullets coming back their way in the future. I can certainly see this feedback loop playing out on both sides of this conflict, because every Israeli civilian casualty results in more support for hard-line military response against Gaza, and every Palestinian civilian casualty results in more support for Hamas.
* This example is taken from an Obama-era US drone strike in Pakistan, because I'm far too distressed to track specific tragedies happening in Israel and Palestine in real time.
I believe you're talking about the 2008 missile strike on wedding convoy in Yemen while Bush was in office during a firefight between US forces and the Taliban. I do not think the US officially took responsibility for that attack.
You're partially right; I can no longer find a source for the strike in Pakistan that I thought I was remembering, although there are numerous that weren't wedding-related. Perhaps I was confusing it with a few different US wedding airstrikes (as perhaps you are as well, as the Yemen wedding attack was in 2013, and no Taliban firefight was involved).
The person responsible is the one who pulls the trigger. If a murderer runs into a crowd of people it wouldn't be OK for the police to just mow down those people to catch them. And that's an exact analogy here, just because a terrorist hides within a community does not mean you have any kind of moral justification for killing with impunity. Blame the community? Sure, does that blame extend to the kids growing up in that community who know nothing about what's going on. No, it doesn't.
I did a quick search for this. Seems like there's some controversy over the numbers, even though they've tried to back it with evidence. That's approaching 5x the official numbers of Israeli casualties, so even if its been inflated my 3x is probably already low and out of date.
Now you might take that figure with a grain of salt, I cannot verify it and wouldn't trust it at present. However, there are plenty of individual stories being reported by agencies I have enough trust in (and some of which I wish now I had not read). You can't accurately shell buildings in a densely built up city like Gaza. Israel told people to move, but there are credible reports that they then attacked people in transit, shelled an area near the south they'd asked people to move to and shelled a refugee camp.
I'm sure that in every case Israel will argue they had intelligence. But I don't think the families of those who see their kids killed in those strikes are going to care. They're just making the next angry generation by applying indiscriminate vengeful violence.