Israel is Justified in Attacking Hamas' Forces in the Gaza Strip.

Implicitly, a normally unjustifiable act is justifiable only if a)It is expected to put a stop to certain other unjustifiable acts, and b)It is the least harmful of all possible acts that would satisfy (a). The act in question is the Final Solution to the Islamic Problem. (b) is supported by the lonely assertion that the exhaustively "numerous" alternative measures "have been tried and failed." (a) is supported by nothing. The rest of your argument is only a case for a premise of (a), namely that Hamas is not so unique a government as to be free of sin. And that leads us to the missing property of justifiable injustice: c)It is universally permissible. But it cannot be true that, for example, it couldn't "be expected that any government would turn a blind eye to the slaying of thousands of women and children in it's own country,": the rhetorical target of the Israeli offensive, for example, has seen women and children in it's own country slain by Israel itself. In that contest, Israel out-kills women and children, not to mention the appropriate category (civilians generally), by a couple of orders of magnitude. And that's roughly consistent with the history of the broader conflict. Hamas, given Israel's benefit of the doubt, would prefer its victims to be only those Israelis most responsible for the siege of Gaza and, now, the women-and-children-slaying you're championing. But, like Israel, Hamas fears the heavy military sacrifice inherent to more precise destruction. Like Israel, it prefers to make its "chicken's footprint" from a comfortable distance. In fact, giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt is too conservative, as Hamas evidently wants nothing more than for Israel to come down from the sky and fight fair. This is natural, as the present tit-for-tat clearly favors the Israelis. And the actual targeting of civilians, as Israel continues to do, is not "conventional warfare". It happens to be a war crime. Israel and our own government, incidentally, are unique in being the only countries to vote against the UN General Assembly resolution that accompanied the first and consequently only World Court decision ever to order the cessation of state terrorism (both the US and Israel were complicit in said terrorism and continued to be, hence the present irrelevance of Geneva which you rightfully lament). In fact, Israel (matched only by the US) is far and away the greatest explicit opponents of Geneva, if votes speak. That should not encourage any force, particularly an underdog like Hamas, to observe "convention" when dealing with the rogue state. It can't be true that "Israel has not forced it's [sic] will on the people of Gaza", for we only have to read on to immediately learn that Israel's rule of being unprovocative is proven by the exception "the relocation of the Palestinian peoples". Added to which, that relocation is part of a continuous, illegal occupation. Added to which, a blockade is (by your own favored conventions) considered an act of war. The current blockade is antecedent to the rocket attacks and uninterrupted by cease-fires. So a cease-fire here isn't peace. Because of the disproportionately (disproportionate to the demographics of the blockaded and, probably, to the demographics of the Qassam victims that you anachronistically mean Israel to be avenging) civilian, disproportionately child, deaths associated with blockades and previous warfare, and the anger they should generate, it should not be surprising if Hamas is correct in claiming independent groups broke the cease-fire. It is of course irrelevant that Israel doesn't recognize Hamas as legitimate, for the particulars of Hamas' rise to power are as in the past as original Palestinian Removal. Hamas was certainly elected, though, and is evidently more popular among its people than the Israeli government among Israelis.