Firing of inaccurate rockets is not a very efficient way of killing civilians. Delivering the explosives through suicide bombers, or for that matter IRA style non-suicide bombers, is a lot more efficient if that is the aim. So it seems unlikely that that is what Hamas has being doing.

And the IDF could very easily have killed far greater numbers if that was what they had been doing.

Throwing around those kind of accusations is just playing propaganda, and it provides an easy escape from the true horror of what has been and is going on. It's an accusations that doesn't have any impact.

What has been happening, on both sides, is that people are using such weapons as they have at their disposal as ways of conveying a political message to their opponents on the other side and of strengthening their position in relation to their opponents on their own side. And in this they have been coldbloodedly disreqarding the fact that their actions have caused, and are causing the deaths of innocent civilians on the other side.

The fact that there is such an enormous disparity between the death and suffering caused by the IDF actions and that caused by Hamas inevitably affects the way people respond. In one way this is wrong - there's a quote (from some great rabbi I think) about how killing one person is equivalent to killing a universe, and it's true.

But we do react to numbers - 9/11 affected us more than an assassination of a banker on a street somewhere would have. And the hecatomb in Gaza affects outsiders harder than the occasional Hamas rocket that actually killed someone rather than blowing a hole in a field. And I would seriously assert that for pretty well everyone, in this case it is not a matter of the religion or the nationality of the murdered innocents, but because of the scale of the killing. Not just in Gaza today, but over the years as well.

Incidently I'm not suggesting that the fact that the disparity between the numbers killed by the two sides should in itself be seen as indicating some kind of moral difference. If Hamas had the firepower and the delivery systems I am sure they would use this just as ruthlessly as the IDF - and if the IDF merely had the weapons of Hamas they would be using them in much the same way as Hamas has.