1. Hamas is still holding hostages and firing missiles and promises to attack over and over, leading to a situation where the border communities are ethnically

1. Hamas is still holding hostages and firing missiles and promises to attack over and over, leading to a situation where the border communities are ethnically cleansed because nobody sane is going to just wait there for the next attack. The defence is to remove the threat for good. 2. This formulation is mind-reading. I recall the more correct formulation is asking what the "reasonable person" would do. Or in this case the 'reasonable state'. It's probably impossible to define a reasonable state without sneaking in our preferences. But if we look at the past record of democracies, they were very aggressive in similar situations. 3. There are reams of papers on proportionality with never any clear conclusion, because the definition was intentionally made to be subjective. The better options are to look at other states are doing (a lot more dead in the campaign against ISIS) or to compare the likely futures given each course of action and see where less people are killed: There's no peace with Hamas, and they won't let themselves be unelected peacefully. So at best we can expect having another war. We need to compare the future of continuing this war, to the future of stopping and having another one a bit later. I can see a lot of scenarios where the future war is bigger and more destructive compared to this one (the future war would have to retake areas cleared in this one; Hamas could take over the West Bank in the meantime, or manage to drag Hezbollah into the war next time).