IMAGINE your next-door neighbour — with whom you have had a long and bloody feud — pulling out a gun and shooting into your windows from his own lounge room, which is densely packed with women and children. In fact, he's holding his daughter on his lap as he claims he will not stop till your family is dead. Police are unavailable. What should you do?

One option is to do nothing, or little. You try this for a while. After all, your neighbour is poor and traumatised, and you must bear some of the blame. Finally, as one shot hits your child's bedroom, you decide that enough is enough. You pull out your far superior gun. You attempt a surgical strike: aim at the shooter's head, try to spare the innocents.

In an abstract sense, this is what Israel is doing. But there is nothing surgical about the blood and agony that has engulfed Gaza since Saturday. Try as it might to target militants alone, Israel cannot achieve this. Civilian bodies are being pulled out of the rubble of military bases — because, like our metaphorical gunman's home, militants and civilians inhabit the same urban space in the Gaza Strip.

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