I am stunned by the recent news that Hamas continues to fire missiles into Israel. The reason I am stunned is that I truly believe that Israel will, again, retaliate and in the process many more innocents will die.

I also believe that Israel has the right to do whatever it can to stop these attacks - especially as they are no attempts by the Governemtn of Gaza to control them (for whatever reason/s) although both Hamas and Israel are in the middle of discussing a cease fire (I would have thought that both sides would show some sort of restraint during negotiations).

Given these continued rockets attacks into and Israel's obvious upcoming counter attack why is it that civilians are not being evacuated into the hinterland to escape and/or avoid the destruction that will be coming?

Is it a case of more sacrificial human shields for Hamas "freedom fighters"?

Mind you this sort of behaviour is nothing new. Very time we have a new conflict the propotion of civilians that die gets higher and higher when compared to the combatants that get killed - but the purposeful use of unarmed civilians as shields for combatants is relatively new - started (as far as I know) during the Vietnam war but I could be wrong.