Any time someone posts something quoting an Arabian or Palestinian source it is completely disregarded. So, this is an Israeli source, and even it talks about "hundreds" of dead Palestinians. From other sources it seems some were executed, by the way. And we hear a lot about the Israeli casualties, which are apparently far fewer.

Regarding the "military" action, and the ratio of casualties. First, it's not a "military" action. The Palestinians have no army, no tanks, no helicopters, no F-16s. At best they had a small paramilitary force without heavy weapons which had largely police functions.

Second, regarding whether the Palestinians were shooting at the Israelis, or shot in the back. The Israeli Army has invaded Palestinian territory which is not guarded by an army. I would suspect the Palestinians have a right to shoot at them in an invasion like this, similar to your right to protect your home. Presumably the Palestinians have guns for the same reasons the NRA wants guns. If the Israelis, with their tanks and helicopters and bulldozers, don't want to get shot at, they could go home.

On their way to looking for weapons caches and facilities the Israelis are on Palestinian territory terrorizing the civilian population, vandalizing private homes, executing the police forces, and tearing up the Palestinian urban infrastructure. In general they are behaving very much like the Germans in occupied territories during WWII, who would line up the men in a village and shoot them if there had been some resistance to Germany. (Did you see the TV clip the other night showing Sharon talking with another man, seemingly ordering the summary execution of a suspected Palestinian when they thought the microphones were off? It was significant enough to run on network TV. I did.)

Would you not expect the Palestinians to fight back with what they had? Is self-defense against an invading force a legitimate reason to use deadly force? What would you do?

So, without tanks, heavy weapons, helicopters, fighter aircraft, they are resisting, sustaining many, many more casualties than the Israelis, who have invaded them. Frankly, the Palestinians look very much like the Jews of the 1940s, in the Polish ghettos, and the Jews seem like the Germans of the same era in occupied territories.

I don't think you can reasonably say that it's a "military" action, and that's the way it goes. It's an invading army with heavy weapons against a civilian population with light arms. The longer it goes on, the more horrific it is.

And, by the way, the military deliberately vandalizing civilian homes is "terrorism". Always has been.

What will it take for people to notice there is something way beyond reason happening here, that a man with a history of slaughtering relatively helpless people has been turned loose upon another relatively helpless population?

Arf