“Every civilian casualty is a tragedy, a tragedy of Hamas’s own making,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Wednesday. He did not address the objection, raised by some of his critics, that Israel’s own military command center is close to a Tel Aviv hospital.

Not all Israel’s supporters agree. “A provocation does not relieve one of accountability for how one responds to it,” Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote on Wednesday, echoing an argument made last month by the Palestinian-American legal scholar George Bisharat. “For this reason,” Mr. Wieseltier added, “the war has filled me with disquiet, which my sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position has failed to stifle.”

Mr. Wieseltier then reminded his readers that “On the Slaughter,” a poetic meditation on a bloody pogrom in czarist Russia cited by Israel’s prime minister last month after the killing of three Jewish teenagers by Islamist militants, argued explicitly that the the killing of children was an unfathomable outrage. “After all, even Satan has not yet devised the proper vengeance for the death of a child,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.

“I have been surprised by the magnitude of the indifference in the Jewish world to the human costs of Israel’s defense against the missiles and the tunnels,” Mr. Wieseltier wrote. “Some of the emails I have received have been lunatic in their lack of compassion. According to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 95 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the war in Gaza is just. It is easy to see why: Self-defense is also a moral duty. But only 4 percent believe that the Israeli military has used excessive force. This makes me queasy.”

Asked to explain how an offensive that has claimed so many lives is nonetheless supported in Israel, Eva Illouz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “Israelis have a strong sense of their own moral superiority. ‘We ask people to get out of their houses; we call them on the phone to make sure civilians are evacuated. We behave humanly,’ the Israeli thinks. An army with good manners.”

Most of her fellow citizens, Ms. Illouz added, “judge by the intention, whereas the world judges by the consequences.”

Others, including the Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel, have attempted to draw a bright line between Israel’s conduct and that of Hamas and other militant groups who stand accused of using Gaza’s children as “human shields.” In an essay printed this week in the pages of major American newspapers, including The New York Times, as a paid advertisement, Mr. Wiesel invoked the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to accuse the Islamist fighters of practicing a form of “child sacrifice.”