1. I don't, honestly, expect the IDF to destroy Hamas. Neither, however, do I expect the situation for Palestinians to be tolerable while Hamas is in power. Their strongest argument for their rule rather than someone less combative is how intolerable things are.

2. Israel doesn't have anyone worth negotiating with for lasting peace anyway, so it doesn't matter, for those negotiations, whether they blow up the leadership. It is useful for kicking the can down the road--dialing down the current conflict, giving time to find some other path forward. This would be more compelling if people could articulate a vision that was more acceptable to both sides.

4. Not all guerilla warfare is justified or moral. Civilians getting killed because guerilla warriors are hiding behind them is also "just how guerilla warfare works". This is one of the big reasons why it's often neither justified nor moral.

5. I think lives are of roughly equivalent potential value. However, there are various ways--mostly in supporting and/or enacting violence against the comparatively peaceful--that one's life can become forfeit, given that every other general rule produces worse outcomes. The Palestinians had 18 years to focus on building a vibrant peaceful economy, and instead chose leaders who spent 18 years focused far more on launching a violent guerilla war with proclamations that this will persist until Israel as currently conceived ceases to exist.

It is heartbreaking when a group of people commit themselves to a course of action that inevitably puts them on a collision course with some other group, and the only solution is massive death or consequences that are viewed as as-bad-as-death. We should try to rescue people from these horrible conflicts to the extent possible. However, when it is their own fault, the terrible sadness and pain we feel in empathy with their plight should not move us to embrace their insistence that they will only accept conditions that are intolerable to others.

Instead, when irreconcilable conflicts occur, we ask: which are the least important constraints for humans in general that we can relax which would allow a peaceful and mutually tolerable solution if-this-constraint-could-be-relaxed? Then we can work towards this.

This has implications on both sides.

In particular, we cannot both support the freedom of a people to choose its own leaders and the right of a people to not be killed en masse when they choose leaders that lead to mass killing.

So Netanyahu and the farther right people in his cabinet have to go. I think it's entirely reasonable to cease aid entirely unless there is a plan for how to do this in an orderly fashion--or an alternative, like radical transparency in all military actions with impactful consequences for those which are gratuitously destructive or not imminently necessary.

But also Hamas has to go, and if they won't, or the people of Palestine won't let them, I think it's entirely reasonable to militarily cripple them so as to render them largely harmless until things change--or an alternative, like radical disavowal of any and all direct military opposition to Israel save in defense against wholly unprovoked attacks.

As a compromise, heavily supporting Israel with lower-yield weaponry and letting them and Hamas fight it out seems a very bad situation, but everything else seems worse unless people on both sides can make some massive compromises (mostly on Hamas' side, because their starting position is the least justifiable from a what-do-humans-need-to-survive-and-thrive standpoint).