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Notes -
It seems like that's largely owed to the fact that any amount of striking buildings that house Hamas and also (by Hamas' design) house the helpless is going to look like massacring the helpless. The only way to not massacre any helpless in this case is to stop doing anything, or invent magical weapons like that one scene from Iron Man where he takes out terrorists with micromissiles while sparing every hostage they had.
Granted, but at some point if you have any humanity you have to say, 'the number of helpless people we're massacring is not worth the number of terrorists we're killing".
The point of killing terrorists is usually not to kill terrorists for the sake of it, but to protect the helpless people that are close to you.
Perhaps at some point it would be "humane" to give up and let the terrorists do what they want because they have too many human shields. I do not believe that point has been reached, or that Hamas can ever hold that many people hostage.
Yes, of course, that was implicit.
You seem to be saying that the number of people killed in Gaza is well below the number you feel would be worth ensuring that no Israeli is ever again killed by Hamas, and that this number is not de facto reachable given the scale of the current conflict. That, to me, seems to indicate that you believe the appropriate number is greater than the number of helpless civilians remaining in Gaza. And yes, I do find that abhorrent. If I said three decades ago that killing all the Irish would be easily worth it to stop the depredations of the IRA you would think I was a maniac, and rightly so.
The wall basically works. The Iron Dome basically works. What happened on Oct 7th was awful, and I feel sympathy for the Israelis who worry about rocket attacks, but neither of those things justify slaughtering far greater numbers of Gazans.
I do not believe that Israel can indefinitely protect itself from Hamas and its other hostile neighbours with purely defensive tactics, and moreover, I do not believe they are obligated to restrict themselves so.
If you said killing all the Irish was worth it to stop IRA, I would call you a maniac because by all accounts I know of, IRA's goals were not like Hamas', and IRA's tactics were not like Hamas', and IRA's reliance on putting their own citizens under enemy fire for the sake of martyrdom was, if at all existent, not like Hamas'. IRA was not, as far as I'm aware, making the English pick between their own destruction and killing innocent Irish along with IRA soldiers.
If Gazans have any agency, the onus is on them to drive the militants who are martyring them for "free Palestine" out. If they do not have that agency, I find that I cannot feel more sympathy for them than for those who can and will defend themselves [or are defended by their government].
To condone Gaza indefinitely bombing Israel because Israel can (mostly, for now) take it because stopping them would take more Gazan lives than Gaza currently takes Israeli lives is far too close to the concept of utility monsters for me.
"There's a third option: just leave." - yeah, because that worked so well 109 times before. At least, that's the number Israel's opponents cite sometimes.
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