Dear Friends and Supporters...

"You can't avoid collateral damage if they position the rockets in densely populated areas, in mosques, school yards.  We shouldn't be blamed for the outcome."
Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon

"The targets are exact.  Each and every (Israeli) missile has an address", explained Israeli military spokesman Brig.Gen. Yoav Mordechai.  The very fact is that those missiles target precisely those who have been identified and documented as senior militants.  When they are dispatched sometimes it is done cleanly, another head of the hydra decapitated.

In war there is always huge misfortune for civilians.  And with this war which for Israel is yet another war of defence - the only kind the country has ever fought - there is once again an accumulation of civilian casualties.  Not by design most certainly, but just as certainly by ill fortune; someone being in the wrong place at the right time.

While prosecuting its war of defence, yet another attempt to stem the ongoing tide of rocket attacks against Israeli towns and cities, Israel knows full well that the critical eyes of the world are upon its activities.  Notching critical assays over each reported civilian casualty.  A dozen notches of condemnation for every Palestinian child killed.

The accuracy and careful planning that goes into the retaliatory and defensive artillery and missile shots are not in question, but inaccuracies and complications are simply a fact of reality, war in real-time.  Hamas and Islamic Jihad have no idea where their rockets will land.  Some of them land within the borders of Gaza and do harm there.  But in lobbing them off, the hope is that they will do damage within Israel.

Of the hundreds of rockets that have been launched, one-third of which, including thus far those that have targeted Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, have been caught by the Iron Dome Defense system that has performed beyond reasonable expectations.  Those that have escaped the defense system have gone to their mark to destroy infrastructure and abandoned schools.  Israeli residents of border towns have evacuated.

Those members of the families of targeted Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders who have not evacuated their residences have certainly good reason to do so.  They will join the martyrs sacrificed willingly by Hamas and Islamic Jihad for the greater glory of Islam and the recapture of land dedicated as a sacrament to Islam, by those Israeli strikes giving answer to Hamas rockets seeking out children in Israel.

And Hamas's prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, confidently speaks to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in support of "serious attempts to reach a ceasefire", as long as Hamas receives "guarantees that will prevent any future aggression" by Israel.

While Israel receives the message from the United Kingdom that "a lot of international support and sympathy" will be lost if the IDF mounts a ground invasion to stop the rocket attacks on its soil.