I am all for a response, and certainly in this case I understand a violent one might have been deemed necessary. But imo you don't need to know exactly where the line is to know the Israeli government has gone well beyond it.
We expect nothing from Hamas, because nobody sees them as anything other than a violent, oppressive regime. Israel is a wealthy, highly well armed democracy. There is such a massive imbalance in the power relationship between the two, and in this sort of relationship the one with the vast majority of the power bears the largest responsibility in terms restraint and discretion.
Instead, they have used this power not only indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of men, women and children, but they have also turned their hospitals and infrastructure to dust. Apart from the obvious practical arguments about its usefulness (ie. creation of the next generation of Hamas), it's quite clearly wrong, an ethical abomination both in its underlying motives and execution.
My brother is all very supportive of this using phrases like "I support Israel's right to exist" (yeah, pretty much all of us do) and "Hamas are an evil regime" (Stop the presses!). It's very annoying because I thought it would be a simple thing that everyone could agree on, that this level of slaughter cannot be justified by anything. There is no way those children were Hamas members before they were turned into burned and limbless corpses.
