As Israel again fights for survival can there be any more justified

As Israel again fights for survival, can there be any more justified target than a man who ordered so many suicide bombings?As the UK and US hunt for Bin Laden, what excuse is there for vilifying Israel for killing Yassin? Israeli lives are no less valuable than American or British. These Palestinian leaders will not settle for just part of the land: they demand it all.Sheikh Yassin was a prime instigator in this war, especially in the murdering of civilians. To judge by the last 50 years or so, Israel has little to fear on that score.CHRIS WEBSTER Abergavenny, MonmouthshireSir: Every war which Israel has fought has been a war of survival. This present war was initiated by Palestinian leaders immediately after being offered 97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and part of Jerusalem. On the contrary, Hamas has been fully deployed to try to carry out a successful operation in Israel, and removing its leadership will only hamper its capability to respond.Those who hypocritically criticise Israel for doing what they would be happy to do to their own terrorist enemies will in time benefit from this act.

Should we in Israel just keep taking this terrible toll while doing nothing in response?I have heard commentators say that Israel’s act will result in increased terrorism. The removal of Yassin makes the prospects for peace better in the longer run rather than worse.Hamas is responsible for the murder of about 500 Israelis and 3,000 injured in the past three years. However, it also provoked German reprisals on a horrifying scale, including the notorious liquidation of the entire population of the village of Lidice and its erasure from the map.Those who think that targeted assassination can break cycles of violence, whether in Europe in the 1940s or the Middle East today, fool no one but themselves. One shudders to think how many people, alive now, will soon be dead or horribly maimed because of the entirely predictable results of this latest piece of misguided thinking.SEAN LANG CambridgeSir: In the wake of the killing of Sheikh Yassin many outrageous statements have been made in the media, such as that peace prospects in the Middle East will now be set back.How absurd.

The recent Hamas use of women bombers was personally justified by Yassin in Islamic religious terms. If anyone can find any statement of Yassin in favour of peace with Israel I’d like to see it; he was the most vitriolic anti-peace leader amongst the Palestinians, and was responsible for organising suicide bombings. In 1942 Czech agents parachuted in by the RAF assassinated the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, which doubtless occasioned a lot of pleasure. He concludes that it would not, and moreover, that it would have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure.No doubt But we do not have to speculate.

The Israel of the 1960s seems to have understood that the rule of law is the right answer when dealing with terrorist and war criminals – not adopting their methods.JOHN STRAWSON Principal Lecturer in Law University of East LondonSir: Matthew Hoffman asks whether it would have been immoral for a Jew to have assassinated Hitler, had the opportunity presented itself. However, he does seem to have forgotten that when Jews in the shape of the Israeli Mossad got close to Eichmann in Argentina they did not kill him but arrested and put him on trial in Jerusalem.There seems to be a loss of proportion when dealing with the “war on terror”: Yassin is assassinated and Eichmann, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, is put on trial. Being resolute in the face of their terrorism and persisting through intelligence work to arrest the perpetrators of the violence, while working to undermine the basis of support for the terrorists, has helped make the IRA leadership realise their war cannot be won. The “shoot to kill” policy, on the other hand, merely strengthened the IRA’s hand, helping them garner more support in the US and elsewhere, and bringing a resolution no nearer.JOHN HOLBOROW Stalbridge , DorsetSir: Matthew Hoffman asks whether it would have been immoral for a Jew to kill Hitler I can easily answer no.