A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.

Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he had carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. “They are doing good,” Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, “but they can do more.”

And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.

…I will not conceal my enjoyment of the flames and smoke rising from Gaza that have poured from our television screens … The air force is generally only the appetizer - the first course. But tasty as it is, it is not enough.

“I am willing to suffer weeks, months, until they are begging us to stop. I wouldn’t have supported [Ehud] Barak and [Tzipi] Livni last week, but what they have done now is genius.”