Counterterrorism is necessarily a difficult and fraught process. Ultimately, it's political; military force is useful only so far as it can convince people there is no better way than your political aims.
Looking at the example of successful counterterrorism conclusions, such as The Troubles in Northern Ireland or Colombia's efforts against FARC, the general pathway to success is to build up successful alternative political institutions that have the legitimacy to disarm the terrorist groups, which also means to a degree making some concessions towards the political aims of terrorists, and perhaps also requires co-opting the more moderate terrorists into legitimate political parties.
Notably not on that list is such things as targeting enemy leaders with artillery rounds. Indiscriminate damage is one of the best ways to fuel an upsurge in terrorist violence; what Israel is doing now looks in many ways like what the British did in Northern Ireland to start The Troubles rather than what it did to end them.
I agree that Northern Ireland and Colombia v. FARC are useful examples. However, they both share one key property that the Israel-Hamas conflict does not have: the international community fully supports the existence of both the UK and Colombia as legitimate nation-states. That is not true for Israel; there is a large and vocal segment of the international community that does not want Israel to exist, and that segment has enough political clout that it cannot be ignored.
The segment of the international community that matters is fully on board with Israel's existence. The largest country to not formally recognize Israel is Indonesia. Largely only Iran is intransigent about Israel's nonexistence; the Arab countries have in the recent past explicitly endorsed proposals to recognize Israel in exchange for durable progress on Palestinian statehood.
(Which, really, is one of the principal causes of the current situation: Netanyahu has in the past sought to undermine the ability of the Palestinian Authority to effectively govern Palestine--including covert support for Hamas--so as to be able to claim that there's no partner for peace to avoid having to make any progress on the statehood issue.)
> The segment of the international community that matters is fully on board with Israel's existence.
I disagree. US policy in this area, for instance, is being significantly influenced by the fact that there are protests at major universities in support of Hamas, and elected politicians who are advocating the same thing. (And by that I mean explicitly supporting the Hamas objective of destroying Israel.)
> the Arab countries have in the recent past explicitly endorsed proposals to recognize Israel
In other words, they don't currently support Israel's existence, but they might decide to if enough of their demands are met. Which concedes my point.
The reason this matters is that the UK and Colombia were only able to even consider the options they ended up taking to resolve their conflicts because they knew that no matter what, their existence as nation states was not in question. Israel does not have that assurance, and that means they do not feel able to consider those kinds of options.
Or, to put it another way, as I have said in several other posts elsewhere in this discussion, this conflict is an existential conflict for Israel. Northern Ireland was not an existential conflict for the UK, and FARC was not an existential conflict for Colombia. That makes a huge difference.
> US policy in this area, for instance, is being significantly influenced by the fact that there are protests at major universities
I'm sorry, but no. These protests have only reached salience in the news because of overreaction from a few university presidents who sent in the police to (in the event) violently break up the protest. I assert there is no influence on the policy being done by these protests. The general stance by the administration has remained the same--the Biden administration remains firmly pro-Israel--and to the extent that it's changed, it's been prompted by frustration with the continued inability of the current Israeli government to actually listen to the administration's points about "what the hell is your day-after plan?"
> in support of Hamas, and elected politicians who are advocating the same thing. (And by that I mean explicitly supporting the Hamas objective of destroying Israel.)
I'm not going to deny that there are people among the protestors who support Hamas and maybe even want to see Israel cease to exist. But it's definitely far from the majority of the protestors, and I've never actually seen any statement by anybody involved that would place them in that category.
The thing is, there's this persistent tendency I've seen where people try to twist any criticism of Israel or its government into support for Israel's nonexistence. No major world power today has disestablishment of Israel a policy goal, nor is any of them close to having that policy. But I do worry that if Israel continues on this path, then it may in a few decades' time become a murderous genocidal state... and that very well could have the superpowers pushing for Israel's destruction.
Even though Israel is unarguably the state that faces the greatest existential threat, it's policies can still be (and indeed probably are) counterproductive to combating that.
Looking at the example of successful counterterrorism conclusions, such as The Troubles in Northern Ireland or Colombia's efforts against FARC, the general pathway to success is to build up successful alternative political institutions that have the legitimacy to disarm the terrorist groups, which also means to a degree making some concessions towards the political aims of terrorists, and perhaps also requires co-opting the more moderate terrorists into legitimate political parties.
Notably not on that list is such things as targeting enemy leaders with artillery rounds. Indiscriminate damage is one of the best ways to fuel an upsurge in terrorist violence; what Israel is doing now looks in many ways like what the British did in Northern Ireland to start The Troubles rather than what it did to end them.