I’m not a military man but maybe they’re looking at the people who are trying to hide Hamas as terrorists to
That's an issue I've thought about, too. I wonder what fraction of young and middle aged men are active in Hamas. I wonder what fraction of their wives and adolescent children are unaware of that they have fathers, husbands, and sons working for Hamas. I wonder what fraction of Palestinians know where the hostages and tunnels are but keep that secret or whether they could safely divulge such information if they had it. How many were aware of the training exercises prior to 10-7 and kept the secret. My guess is that the majority of Palestinians old enough to have an opinion support Hamas and help it. Those people knew what might result from this attack, and apparently tacitly condoned it, but that might be incorrect. Maybe there were tens of thousands of people who objected but were forced to do so silently, but how can that be if they had telephones and knew what was coming?
In any event, the Palestinian people will suffer the consequences for all those who participated in this attack, supported those who did actively or by looking away. Whatever fraction that actually is sympathetic to Hamas and the effort to attack Israel has brought this on their people, , which I can only hope was the majority of them.
Children below a certain age can't be considered complicit, but what duty do the Israeli's have to protect those children if it was their parents that put them in harm's way by participating in or willingly keeping secrets for them? And why should the Israelis believe that those boys and girls won't be the next generation of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers? Different people will answer these questions differently.
As for me, it is what it is. I don't have an opinion regarding what Israel should do. The problem seems to unsolvable whatever they choose. They can vacate Israel as the Palestinians and surrounding Arabs insist upon, tolerate the attacks, respond with minimal force, or do what they're doing and exact a harsh punishment. I see none of these working.
Nor can there be a two-state solution given the Palestinians' commitment to exterminating their unwelcome neighbors, which in my opinion is the root problem of Arab-Israeli hostilities. This inability to ever simply accept the right of Israel to exist in peace, which appears to be widespread among the Palestinians, appears to be a self-destructive cultural and moral defect.
I remain detached, a disinterested observer from afar. I find myself increasingly withdrawing emotionally from the world except my immediate piece of it. It's compassion fatigue, and I don't want to feel badly. We are each responsible for managing our emotional well-being, and in a world dominated by a pandemic and its mask and vaccine tantrums, the invasion of Ukraine, runaway climate disaster, this war, and MAGA phenomenon with its perpetual disgusting politics, I choose to have no emotional reaction to any of it insofar as that is possible. Good luck to them all, including those of you suffering vicariously with the Palestinians.