Can the killing of innocent civilians ever be justified?

Israel has made the first, rather tentative, moves of its ground operation against Hamas – but there’s nothing tentative about its aerial bombing. Here’s a report of one incident: at 4.30 p.m. on 10 October, an explosion collapsed a six-storey building in Sheikh Radwan, a district of Gaza City, killing, it was said, at least 40 civilians. One man, Mahmoud Ashour, had to dig through the rubble with his bare hands to find his family. Buried there were his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two, and six months. They had fled there thinking it would be safer than other parts of Gaza. But, he said: ‘I couldn’t protect them. I have no trace left of my daughter.’

This account is from Amnesty International, and they have no doubts this was an air strike, not a misfired Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket. They discovered that a member of Hamas was living in the building, though he wasn’t there at the time. Anyway, Amnesty’s report says, ‘membership in a political group’ shouldn’t be enough to kill someone. And if this was a Hamas fighter or commander, that didn’t justify destroying the whole building: ‘This was an indiscriminate attack… and must be investigated as a war crime.’ The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) told me that Amnesty’s accusation rested on ‘the assumption that intelligence regarding the military use of a particular structure does not exist unless revealed’. Their statement gave no hint as to why they targeted the apartment block – if this was an Israeli airstrike – but it accused Hamas of routinely putting military assets in densely populated areas. ‘The IDF regrets any harm caused to civilians.