Yeah I don’t want to derail this thread with a complicated topic, but there was a gap in international law as it related to aerial bombardment due partially to technology outstripping the law, and partially lack of agreement on how to regulate it prior to WWII. There was a Hague convention of 1907 that had vague applicability to aerial bombardment of cities, but the provisions of it were so broad that it provided no actual legal objection to even the most massive and indiscriminate of carpet bombings (and even including nuclear bombings.) There was another one that prohibited bombing from “balloons”, but did not apply to fixed winged aircraft.
There has been an attempt to rectify this ever since, culminating in a Geneva Convention (Protocol I) promulgated in 1977. However interestingly Israel and the United States are two of the only countries that have not signed on with Protocol I, so technically are not bound to it. Although I believe both countries “operationally” and as a matter of policy, attempt to act as if they are.
FWIW–Protocol I, because of Japanese behavior in WWII (they intentionally commingled a lot of military production and military housing with civilian housing), specifically addresses the sort of behavior Hamas engages in. It makes it a war crime to mix your military facilities and activities with civilian buildings like that, and in fact makes the deaths of those civilians a war crime for which the party being bombed is legally responsible, meaning under Protocol I of the GC if Hamas launches rockets from civilian infrastructure, Israel responds, civilians die, it is actually Hamas that has committed the war crime and is legally responsible for their deaths.
Again, I don’t know how far we want to go down this aside, but just clarifying.