Israel’s President, Shimon Peres, says: Israel’s aim, he said, was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel.

He says it gives him “no pleasure” to see people suffering, but he also says that the main point of the operation is to provide a strong blow to Gaza’s population to teach them a lesson. So that’s kind of a disingenuous protestation of displeasure.

Israeli officials are hardly alone in embracing this sort of morally hideous behavior. Indeed as noted there’s reason to believe they’ve imported these ideas from the hawkish camp in the United States. And of course policies oriented around collective punishment and reprisal targeting of civilian populations are hardly unheard of in human history. But they’re wrong and a substantial body of international humanitarian law is dedicated to making them illegal.