UNLIKE some of your correspondents, whom it would appear fully support the murderous exploits of Hamas against Israeli civilians, I refer to recent letters from Steve Jones and Ian Greenhalgh, along with comments made by Bolton East MP David Crausby, I fully support the Israelis in their right to exercise self defence.

The fantasisings of Ian Greenhalgh “Dreams of peace in the Middle East, (August 2) I didn’t know people could be so naïve.

As long as Hamas is allowed to exist there never will be a peace.

There is no land to give back to the Palestinians, as Palestine never existed in the first place.

The lands Mr Greenhalgh refers to, that he claims Israel stole from Palestine, were actually captured from Egypt and Jordan along with the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 six-day war.

After these Islamic states conspired to launch an all-out attack to wipe out the Jewish state, but thankfully they were out witted by the Israelis who found out what they were up to and launched their own pre-emptive strike, soundly beating these aggressive nations.

Palestinians are indistinguishable from Jordanians, Lebanese, Syrians, etc. There is no separate Palestinian culture or language.

The route of the problem is that Arab nations within the region refused to take in refugees thus fuelling and inflaming the situation for their own political ends.

Israel has a fundamental right of self-defence just as in this country, we exercised that same right during WWII.

In that conflict the only way for a time to hit back at the Nazis was for the RAF to bomb Germany.

The methods were crude in those days and unfortunately hundreds of thousands of ‘innocent’ German civilians perished.

War is extremely unpleasant, dirty and expensive and Israel does not purposely target innocent civilians and has gone out of its way to try to avoid this, by issuing warnings to the civilian population.

Stuart A Chapman Isle of Wight