Israeli strike on UN school in Gaza reportedly kills at least 35

So I deeply hesitate to wade into this debate and may regret it. But a few observations on determining the morality of Israeli tactics.

First, there's much debate about how much you can trust the statistics and what you can see. But we have to remember that neutral journalists are not allowed in and if they get in, they tend to find themselves accidentally shot by snipers at a statistically improbable rate. Transmissions are often blocked and facilities disabled. So keep that in mind when you hear that you're not getting information from any credible source. To the degree that it is true, it's by intention. Credible sources are either prevented access or blocked from transmission.

Second is remembering the so-called formula for the morality behind strikes like bombings. I will stipulate that the IDF has a formula in place where they strike at "legitimate" targets. But the variables that enter into that equation are not precisely known and there is every reason to believe they tend towards the less defensible side of the calculation.

First, what constitutes a legitimate target and second,what is permissible in terms of civilian casualties to get the target.

Israel has acknowledged they use the same type of analysis like most western militaries do. But they don't give you the underlying data, which is not necessarily surprising. So you don't know how many civilians they are willing to tolerate killing to get one legitimate Target as they define them. If you want to see an example of how this works in fiction, there was a great movie a few years ago with Helen Mirren about drone strikes that I think was called Eye in the Sky. Very over-simplistically, you make your best possible calculation as to how many civilians will be killed by the strike and see if it fits within the parameters of what you will accept.

We don't know the precise formulas Israel will accept but we have some clue from the triple drone strike on the WCK convoy, Chef Jose Andres. In that case, Israel acknowledged knowing it was a convoy of aid workers that they had no reason of suspecting were combatants, but that they thought they saw one person with a gun. Which means that their rules of engagement in advance allowed to wipe out all seven of the innocent aid workers if they thought they got one combatant, and obviously it did not require much of the way of higher level review to confirm the analysis.

The other variable that we don't know about is how they determine what constitutes a combatant. There was a lot of reliable reporting about using AI software, at least one of which was called Lavender, that "identified" likely combatants using the variety of supposedly correlational criteria as opposed to direct intelligence, such as age, gender, connections, etc.

So it seems very likely that the determination of what constitutes a legitimate combatant is, at a minimum, wildly subject to over identification. And in terms of the numbers of civilian casualties you will accept to get that one combatant, it seems to be a pretty broad standard.

None of this is definitively known but it's pretty reasonable to assume