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But killing 300+ innocents in a matter of weeks in response to what, 10-20 rocket attack deaths in the past 4 years? But don't take this to mean I sympathize with the terrorists hiding among the dense civillian population. Mothers on both sides of the fence are loosing thier children needlessly.
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Then again, this convo has nothing to do with just discussing WP rounds anymore and is going to be all rhetoric and politics.
OK, lets try this equation: How many people would you agree to be killed in exchange for your son? 1? 10? 100? 1000? 1E+6?
I know that all humanity can burn in exchange to mine.
A government does however place value on the lives of its citizens. It has to. But when those 10-20 deaths are not do to an incident, but to a method, I want you to find the man to go and explain the mother why it was allowed to repeatedly attempt to kill her son until it finally worked. This is the difference between an incident and a pattern.
Does it make a difference if you kill 900 people in a year or in a day? of course it does. 900 people/year does not make the news, while 900/day is breaking news - that is it. For any of those 900 it does not matter if 899 others were killed and in what time frame.
Where am I going with this? It is the method of organizations such as Hamas and Hizballa to stage endless continuous small incidents, that will not make the world news and none is a cause for major retaliation. When finally the attacked state decides it will not take it any longer and decides to change the rules, what the world see is a "disproportionate" (what is that anyway?) response to the last minor incident, completely ignoring the very long sequence that lead to it. What was perceived as the cause for the 2006 Lebanon war is the kidnapping of the 2 (dead) Isreali soldiers, completely ignoring the 6 years in which Hizballa was staging attacks against Israel, every 3 months (almost clockwork) over the border marked by the UN (U is for Useless) in 2000. A government would like to break the pattern BEFORE its own dead count matches the one it will cause on the other side in order to break it. If there are going to be any killing done, it is better to be on the delivering and not the receiving end.
Regarding the WP, the whole accusation is idiotic. Israel does not stage area attacks on populations (unlike some good old western countries and not that long ago). If it did, it has far better ways to do it and it will not be a few reported incidents, it will be a total carnage. WP is used for other purposes and if civilians were injured by it than that is unfortunate, but not a goal. Collateral damage is inevitable, especially since this is what Hamas wants and tries to archive. The idea of legal "rules" to wars is problematic - "hits are allowed only to the body. The dead deserve an open casket funeral".
