politics

War is hell, and civilians suffer in every armed conflict. It is preferable to avoid civilian causalities, but that's often not how it goes at all. After generations of ruthless oppression you're going to end up with profound dehumanization of your oppressors. And even if deliberate effort is made to avoid civilian casualties every bullet has to land somewhere.

The civilian status of Israeli settlers is ambiguous as they are directly and proactively involved in the process of genocide. idk if they can be considered combatants per se, but they're definitely in a different category than civilians living peaceably within their own borders. Israeli settlements are a deliberately act of political violence with the express and very conscious intention of displacing and dispossessing Palestinians. They are illegal under international law and by most definitions constitute genocide. The Israeli government has for decades actively pursued a policy of placing Mizrahi on the frontier as a buffer between the Ashkenazi core and the Palestinian territories. And for the most part settlers are ideologically motivated, enthusiastically enacting the goals of Zionism to create a theocratic Israeli ethnostate. Many of them are religious extremists and fascists.

I would prefer that if Hamas is going to take captives they focus on able bodied people of fighting age, but obviously I'm not calling shots on the ground and I will not judge their decisions from the safety of my chair.