From the Wall Street Journal
There are two bedrock principles in war that civilized nations developed over centuries. The first is that you cannot target civilians.
On that standard every Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah rocket attack on Israel is a war crime. They are aimed at cities with the hope of falling on an unlucky cafe or home.
The second principle is proportionality, which is that incidental casualties have to be balanced against the war aims. This is based on the expectation that in any war there will be some innocents killed, but that they must be related to the goals of self-defense. The standard is not zero casualties, which is impossible. It is as few as possible consistent with defeating the enemy.
Yet the Western left has been moving to a standard that any civilian casualties in war are too many.
( Harry Lime and OilCan)
If that is the law of war, then Israel would be denied the right of self defense to destroy an enemy embedded in schools, mosques or dense urban neighborhoods. Under that standard, no Western nation, including the U.S., would be able to strike back against terrorists if civilians might be killed.
Those are not the laws of war, they are the laws of Western unilateral disarmament. Israel deserves U.S. support for its much lied about way of war, in addition to its just cause.