Israel facing more criticism over airstrikes

Israel gets good intelligence that two leaders of Hamas are in a certain area in the town of Rafah in southern Gaza and they launch an instant airstrike. This has happened many times before in the eight-month war in Gaza. The intelligence was right. Two Hamas commanders were killed. But they were hiding in a Palestinian refugee camp. So Israel also killed about 45 civilians, many of them it seems burnt to death when their tented camps caught fire. War is never precise, it's never so minutely targeted that only the bad guys get killed. Yet it seems extraordinary when the Israel Defence Forces (IDF)have come under such scrutiny around the world that they should launch such a strike from the air when the chances of civilian casualties must have been unacceptably high. Israel is losing the public relations and propaganda battle. Could the two identified Hamas commanders not have been taken out by an Israeli special forces unit or was that deemed by IDF chiefs to be too risky? Bombing from the air onto a refugee camp was never going to be free of risk for civilians. Under the international rules of war, civilians must not be targeted and every effort must be made to avoid killing or injuring innocent people. The IDF is carrying out an investigation to see what went wrong. But it's petty clear what happened. They had a short period when the intelligence was ripe for action and the IDF launched an attack before the Hamas indivduals could escape. It was a gamble that went fatally wrong. Not for the first time in this war.