Israel's foreign minister has sought to justify the high number of casualties in Gaza by calling it a normal "product of circumstance".

"We seek out the terrorists, and it can happen that civilians are sometimes hurt in the fight against terror," said Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Israeli Radio.

Livni is running for prime minister in the February elections.

"We had to carry out this operation. I am at peace with the fact that we did it," she said referring to a three-week long offensive against the Gaza Strip which killed at least 1,300 Palestinians, including more than 400 children.

Livni, who had formerly termed civilian deaths as a rather normal outcome of war, vowed to resume the deadly raids should Israel come under rocket attacks by Hamas resistance fighters.

http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=82972&sectionid=351020202

As a matter of interest, the frontrunner to become Israel’s next prime minister, Tzipi Livni, was a Paris agent for Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence agency, in the early 1980s when it ran a series of missions to kill Palestinian terrorists in European capitals, according to former colleagues.

They say Livni, now foreign minister, was on active service when Mamoun Meraish, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation, was shot dead by a Mossad hit squad in Athens on August 21, 1983. She was not directly involved in the killing, in which two young men on a motorcycle drew alongside Meraish’s car and opened fire, but her role in Mossad remains secret.

According to Wikipedia, Livni was born in Tel Aviv & is the daughter of Eitan Livni (born in Poland) and Sara Rosenberg, both prominent former Irgun members. Her father served as the chief operations officer of the Irgun and later, 1974-1984, a member of the knesset from the Likud.

Tzipi Livni served as a lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces and worked for the Mossad for nearly two years during the early 1980s, resigning in August 1983 to marry & finish her law studies.