Certainly there is a justification for a strong response against Hamas. What you need to grapple with is that the response has been against the entire Palestinian population and has caused an enormous death toll of civilian non-combatants.

If I may take your example of the Taliban, a clearly reprehensible organisation. It would not be appropriate for opponents of the Taliban to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of Afghanistan in much the same way that it is not appropriate for the IDF to target the civilian population of Palestine using the crimes of Hamas as justification. Indeed during the Afghanistan war the US and allies took precautions to target fighters and minimise civilian deaths and were rightly criticised when they failed.

Over 10 years of the War in Afghanistan the civilian death toll in Afghanistan was most years less than 4000, in Palestine the civilian death toll is 4 times that in 1 year.

There is no double standard here, no one is saying Israel shouldn’t have responded in a proportionate way to the initial Hamas attacks but what Israel is doing is targeting the civilian population in response to the (admittedly reprehensible) actions of, yes, a few dozen people.

I am genuinely interested in hearing your response here, please don’t take this as a personal attack but I hope you understand my perspective here.