Wrong, actually.
I heard an interesting test to point to the most just arrangement for a situation: pick the one that you would choose if you didn't know ahead of time what position you would have.
So let's consider that: imagine that a flip of a coin will determine whether you're an Israeli civilian or a Palestinian civilian. Would you want Israel to be acting the way it is when there's a 50-50 chance that you'll end up in Gaza yourself?
This is not representative of the situation. Stop with the hypotheticals. Everyone is a bit selfish. If I was you, your kids would be worth more to me than my kids are. If you were me, the same would be said about my kids in regards to you.
Right now, as it stands, Israeli civilians are more important to Netanyahu than Palestinians. I'm not talking about being fair or just. In a time of war, the goal is not to be fair or just, it's to eliminate the enemy/threat while protecting your civilians.
But we're not talking about a simple balance of a Palestinian life vs. an Israeli life. We're talking about a very high cost in Palestinian life vs. a very low decrease (or even perhaps a net increase, all things considered) in risk for Israeli lives. How lopsided does that bargain have to be before it would be immoral for Netanyahu to take it?
The problem with your argument, is that you are assuming that Netanyahu thought to himself:
"They're attacking me today and there's a chance they might hit my civilians. I'm going to go kill 1000 civilians and take out those 10 Hamas soldiers that are hiding behind them."
That's not how it was happening. He was targeting Hamas. He was warning civilians to get the hell out of there. But his mission was to eliminate Hamas soldiers, their firing areas, and the tunnels - all in order to keep his own civilians safe. If 1 civilian or 500000 civilians died, but he completed his mission, then as sad as it is that all these civilians died, he completed his mission and kept his own safe, which the only reasonable thing a prime minister can do. Now if you had a different solution which you could explain that would effectively reduce the amount of casualties, then we could talk about how rotten Netanyahu's attack plan was. Until then, he did better than any other leader would do. As I said, how many wars have you seen or witnessed in which the enemies' civilians were warned before bombings?
Or in your mind, does any benefit for the Israeli people justify any number of Palestinian dead?
not at all, but security of my own life in a time of threat is definitely benefit enough.
AFAIK, the existence of the tunnels was known at least as far back as 2006.
speculation...
You acknowledge the death of Israeli soldiers; even disregarding the Palestinian deaths, do you think this action has saved more Israelis than died in the course of carrying it out?
I never once disregarded the Palestinian deaths. As for the following question, I didn't quite understand. If you're asking "did this operation save more Israelis than would have died on the long run had the operation not taken place?" My answer is yes. They were planning a big hit on the Jewish New Year that would have been very difficult to defend against.
