to put palestinian deaths in perspective, and to answer your question Undertoad, here is a graph taken from The Guardian (UK paper). it separates suicide bombings from the palestinian and israeli deaths.
the majority of palestinian deaths occur when israeli soldiers are bored and decide to shoot at innocents walking the streets or those trying to get to a hospital.
one israeli official claimed that palestinian civilians getting killed is rare and that this attack was the exception instead of the rule. he further stated that when was the last time you heard about palestinian civilians getting killed?
He is somewhat right. you DO never hear about palestinian civilian deaths. they die silent, unheralded deaths. several a day in fact, but you will almost never hear about them in the american media. what does the israeli army say about these deaths. always, it is "looking into the matter." and after that, nothing...
as for apologies, i would like to hear a true israeli apology for an innocent palestinian death. i don't want to hear that "we are looking into the matter."
what does an israeli apology look like? "We
regret the loss."
What do they regret? They regret the negative impact the bombing will have on israel's image on the world stage. they don't regret killing civilians.
a true apology, heartfelt, would be to say that your heart goes out to the families of the victims. some sort of compensation would be given to the families. we all heard this here after 9/11, and you could tell people meant it. "we regret the loss" is toilet-paper fodder.
as for truly selecting a good time to attack, any idiot knows that if you drop a 1 ton bomb in a crowded residential apartment building in the middle of the night when people are sleeping, there are going to plenty of palestinian civilian casualties.
but that's ok. no one was supposed to know. no one ever does. however, they made the mistake of killing too many palestinians at once. that is what they truly regret.