Spectator letters: Human shields, the leadership vacuum, and why HS2 must go ahead

Hamas’s human shields

Sir: Unlike the rockets fired at Basra air base by Iraqi fighters (Tom Drife, Letters, 9 August), rockets from Gaza aim to kill Israeli civilians. A more accurate analogy would be if English cities were under attack by thousands of rockets from Scotland.

Any country under such attack would try to destroy the aggressor’s rocket launch capability. Since Hamas deliberately sites its rockets amongst Gaza’s civilians, it is impossible to do so without civilian casualties. Israel goes to great lengths to avoid these, but with an enemy determined to sacrifice its own people this is not always achievable.

Human shields are not ‘less immoral’ than Israel’s defensive war. Using civilians in this way is a Hamas war crime.

It would indeed be preposterous to accuse all of Israel’s critics of being motivated by anti-Semitism. I didn’t.
Melanie Phillips
Jerusalem

Israel has no choice

Sir: Tom Drife wrote to contrast Israel’s actions in Gaza when confronted with civilians being used as human shields with his own experience with the British army in Basra, where he says the British army never returned fire if fired upon from a residential area. He fails to add the fact that Basra was a humiliating defeat for the British army.

Arguably, Britain could afford to lose in Basra, although the value of committing the lives of hundreds of our young soldiers and billions of pounds to a lost cause is debatable. The Israelis, with millions of militant Muslims on their doorstep willing their demise, cannot afford such luxuries.
Richard North
Netley Abbey, Southampton

The leadership vacuum

Sir: Douglas Murray asks ‘Where have all the leaders gone?’ (9 August). The answer would seem evident. Modern western society doesn’t produce leaders, conditioned as its politicians are to taking their lead from focus groups.