It is apparent that the Israeli attack on Gaza fails on both moral and strategic grounds.
The wide-scale killing of innocents and disproportionality of the Israeli violence make it an unjust war. And, even though he did not argue in quite these same terms, Mencius would agree:
As I mentioned in other posts, Mencius takes a fairly hard line against killing innocents, and he is generally skeptical of war, though perhaps not quite as absolutely so as suggested in passage 14.2. But the attack on Gaza would not be a hard case for him. It is clear that many, many civilians are being killed, and Israel, even though it was hit first with rockets, must bear the moral cost of that. And if the US was true to the principles it espouses it would press Israel to call off the attacks.
From a different perspective, Sun Tzu, who was obviously more willing to condone the use of force than was Mencius, would also find faulty with the Israeli attack. The whole point of using military power, for Sun Tzu, is to secure some sort of strategic goal:
...the best military policy is to attack strategies; the next is to attack alliances; the next is to attack soldiers; and the worst is to assault walled cities. (chapter 3)
The attack on densely populated Gaza is equivalent to an assault on a walled city. I
Sun Tzu understood the horrors of war and he sought to avoid violence as much as possible, and to use violence with as much economy as possible when it was necessary. But there must be some kind of goal, tactical or strategic, that must be achieved, and must be achievable, to make war sensible for Sun Tzu. And this seems to be missing in this sad re-iteration of failed Israeli policy toward Palestine. My former colleague, and now high-flying Foreign Policy Magazine blogger, Abu Aardvark has pointed out, Israel appears to have no real strategy in this fight. Indeed, in another post he points out that the most likely outcome of the assault is an advancement of the interests al-Qaeda. An attack that secures you nothing and stengthens your enemy: an obvious loser from a Sun Tzu point of view.
The Israeli attack on Gaza: morally backrupt and strategically worthless.
Stop the killing.
The Useless Tree 
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