That's certainly how it feels to me; it seems that protecting Palestinian civillian lives are very, very, very low down on the scale of concerns for the IDF.
The IDF has a very short scale of concerns, and - like in Asimov's Laws of Robotics, no lower-ranked concern will ever take precendence over a higher-ranked concern.
The first concern is the safety of Israeli civillians. Number two, safety of Israeli soldiers. Third and last, safety of other non-combatants.
So yes, in a way, your statement is correct. The concern for the well-being of Palestinian non-combatants is last on the list of concerns, but please take note (and this is more unusual than you might think) that their safety IS on the IDF's list of concerns. Had it not been, I would not have been ordered - at no small risk to myself - to set foot in Jenin in early 2002. The IDF went after terrorist cells hiding among the civilian population of Jenin in that operation; the best way to strike at the terrorists with the least damage to civilians was to go in on the ground. Had the welfare of the Palestinian civilians not been on the list of the IDF's concerns at all, what would have prevented us from indiscriminately bombing the whole city? That would have more effectively eliminated the terrorist cells operating out of Jenin, as well as prevented an deaths on the IDF's side.
But we didn't do that because we do care. Sometimes, we wonder if we care about the Palestinians more than they care about themselves. Somebody once said that this will only ever end once the Palestinians love their children more than they hate us. I have to agree.
I find this comment the most telling.
"As long as calm does not prevail on the Israeli side, neither will it do so on the Palestinian side," Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz said this week. "Our operations are going to intensify."
In other words as long as the rocket attacks keep coming we're going to keep indicriminately shelling Gaza in the hope of causing them to stop.
See the problem is that there is a word for indiscriminate attacks on civilians in order to cause political change....
You just blatantly put words into someone's mouth. Where did this "indiscriminate" thing come from? Do you have any clue whatsoever how many dead Palestinians there would be if Israel started shelling Gaza indiscriminately? Try hundreds, if not thousands. We certainly have plenty of firepower to do so. But instead, we've "stuck to our guns" (ironic saying, that) with the targeted strikes on Kassam launch sites and cells.
Where's the cry out to the Palestinians to stop indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli towns, eh? Did you hear about
the rocket that fell directly on top of a teenager's bed? He had left for school just a few minutes beforehand.
What would you have Israel do? Make every effort to eliminate civilian casualties on the Palestinian side, even at the expense of the lives of Israeli soldiers? Sounds like Jenin all over again, just more so.
Anyway, regarding the shell that landed on the beach in Gaza, I honestly
don't know what the real story is. All I can say is that the IDF does not deliberately target Palestinian non-combatants - that is not only utterly pointless, but stupid, and the IDF knows that.