Dead in the rubble of a home in the Gazan town of Jebaliya on Thursday was a senior member of Hamas' leadership -- a man known for personally participating in clashes with Israeli forces and for sending one of his sons on a suicide bombing mission that left two Israelis dead.
But to kill Nizar Rayan, Israeli warplanes had to bomb a four-story apartment building in which the Hamas leader was holed up with his family. The attack leveled the building, severely damaged others around it and left 19 people dead, including nine of Rayan's children and several neighbors.
Health officials estimate that more than 400 Gazans have been killed and some 1,700 injured since Israel began its bombing campaign last week. The death toll -- including more than 60 civilians, at least half of whom were children, according to the United Nations -- has prompted protest outside the embassies of Israel the United States, which is not participating in the campaign but is Israel's staunchest military ally.
But while calling the loss of civilian life "tragic," University of Utah international law expert Amos Guiora said the military operation is an appropriately proportional response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel.
"If you're conducting regular air strikes, which are very targeted, it's going to be inevitable that there will be civilian casualties and damage," Guiora said in a telephone interview from his family home near Jerusalem. "But it's also critical to recognize that some of these civilians are there voluntarily."
Relenting to international pressure, te Israeli government on Friday allowed hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports to leave besieged Gaza. And the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz this week reported that the attacking military has taken the unusual step of calling thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, urging them in messages recorded in Arabic to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons. Guiora said that is evidence that Israel is taking extraordinary measures to prevent civilian deaths. He said that if family members of Hamas militants ignore such warnings, they may be considered "voluntary human shields," and thus a legal, though unfortunate, part of the target.
More such casualties were reported Friday, as Israel bombed a mosque it said was used to store weapons and destroyed the homes of more than a dozen Hamas operatives.
Middle East political expert Stephen Zunes said there is no doubt that militants who hide behind civilians are committing war crimes. But Zunes, who lectures at University of San Francisco, said Israel has overstated that defense for its killing of innocent civilians during past conflicts.
In a report on the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, the non-profit Human Rights Watch said Israeli officials "made the serious allegation that Hezbollah routinely used 'human shields' to immunize its forces from attack and thus bears responsibility for the high civilian toll in Lebanon."
But, the report stated, "the available evidence indicates that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started and fired the majority of their rockets from pre-prepared positions in largely unpopulated valleys and fields outside villages."
Zunes said that even if Hamas is using voluntary human shields, as described by Guiora, that doesn't alone absolve Israel of the moral and legal responsibility for civilian casualties caused in its attacks. "By definition, if you are there voluntarily, you are not a human shield, but in a super-crowded place like Gaza there are not very many places you can run," he said.
That was evidenced Tuesday when Palestinian sisters Haya and Lama Hamdan, ages 4 and 12, were killed while dumping garbage in an empty field near their home in northern Gaza.
Zunes said such incidents do more to harm to Israel's security -- and that makes the offense even worse. In order for a civilian casualty to be taken with anything resembling moral clarity, he said, "you have to believe that killing that civilian, on balance, is going to improve your chances of success."
Yet historically, he said, collateral damage "has the opposite effect -- it just encourages extremism."
Guiora disagrees. He sees evidence in the response of nations like Egypt, which has laid much of the blame for the conflict on Hamas, that the moderate Arab world is turning its back on extremists.
Those who would engage in terrorism as a response to the Gaza attack, he said, "are extremists to begin with anyway."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
