LIFE is intolerable for Palestinian families living in Gaza. They have to negotiate hundreds of Israeli checkpoints, and Israel’s navy has imposed a blockade.

This makes ordinary every day movement nearly impossible.

At the last count, 258 Palestinian civilians had been killed over the past 12 days by Israeli airstrikes. Four children were slaughtered while playing on the beach. And now tanks have made a ground incursion.

This is a catastrophe for the people of Gaza who must be crying to heaven for deliverance. It looks to many as if all this suffering and death is the result of callous overreaction on the part of Israel: bullying, a militarily superior power throwing its weight around.

But I do not see that Israel has any choice except to act in this way. Imagine, you live in Darlington, Stockton or in one of the villages in the area and every day a hundred rockets are fired at you from terrorists on the North Yorks Moors. You would hope that lawful authority would take action against the terrorists and so stop the bombardment.

This is the terror under which Israeli civilians have to live their lives. Many times a day the sirens send people scurrying for the shelters. Schools have to be closed. The threat is relentless.

A military campaign to wipe out the terrorists firing rockets from the sparsely-populated North Yorks Moors might be a fairly simple matter, but what if the rockets were being fired from the middle of Helmsley and Pickering?

The shocking truth is that the terrorists in Hamas deliberately place their rocketlaunchers in heavily populated areas. They love, especially, to site them in school playgrounds and hospital gardens.

Hamas does not use its weaponry to protect its people, but its people to defend its weaponry. They actually invite casualties – because TV pictures of the dead bodies of women and children are good publicity worldwide. And they have the desired result as world opinion is outraged and comes to the conclusion that the Israelis are sadistic barbarians. They have even been compared to the Nazis.

But it is Hamas who are the sadistic barbarians who don’t care a fig for the ordinary civilians in Gaza. Hamas is not a legitimate organisation making rational policies in its justifiable self interest. Hamas is a terrorist group of fanatics, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose oft-declared aim is the destruction of the state of Israel.

Of course, Israel would prefer to have a peace-loving Palestinian state for its nextdoor neighbour. Indeed it has tried to negotiate this on many occasions. In 1998, for example, at Camp David, Bill Clinton came within an ace of achieving this happy arrangement – only for Yasser Arafat to return to the Middle East and tear up the agreement he had just signed, starting a second intifada – terrorist uprising – against Israel.

By all accounts, Hillary Clinton’s comments on Arafat’s treachery are unprintable.

Israel is a democracy surrounded by barbarous enemy tyrannies who have tried four times since 1948 to wipe it off the map.

Thus in 66 years the Israelis have been obliged to fight four defensive wars against these aggressors.

Yes, Gaza is a tragedy. But the tragedy is orchestrated by Hamas.