You're describing conditions that occur in many asymmetric/guerilla wars. None of these are novel tactics whose acceptability must be evaluated from first principles now.

Further, none of these should come as surprises to Israeli commanders, who will have seen these tactics from Hamas in the past.

The bottom line is that any military can only control its own conduct as it represents its citizens in battle.

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> You're describing conditions that occur in many asymmetric/guerilla wars. None of these are novel tactics whose acceptability must be evaluated from first principles now.

Some of those conditions are similar, some aren't. In most cases, the group doing guerilla warfare isn't actively trying to get their own citizens killed, or if you want to be generous, simply doesn't care if they get killed or not.

That said, you're partially right that these conditions have occurred before. That's why many military experts make comparisons to similar situations, like parts of the Iraq war or even closer, fighting against ISIS.

In most of these analyses I've seen, they claim that the IDF performs as well as the US army did in similar situations in terms of protection of civilians, civilian to combatant killed ratios, etc.

> Further, none of these should come as surprises to Israeli commanders, who will have seen these tactics from Hamas in the past.

I don't think anyone is surprised by how Hamas is acting, except much of the international community who simply refuses to accept how Hamas is acting.

> The bottom line is that any military can only control its own conduct as it represents its citizens in battle.

Yes, but if there are legitimate military goals to achieve - and there certainly were legitimate goals to achieve in the beginning of the war - then the military has to fight the battle its enemy is giving it. There simply isn't a way to fight Hamas without inflicting civilian casualties, because of the way it fights. You can choose not to fight it at all, but that wasn't really a choice that was available to Israel on October 7th. (Whether the war should've continued for so long is a different matter.)