I think these equations of Hamas and ordinary Palestinians are typical of political rhetoric where the purpose is to draw attention away from Geneva Convention violations, as in this case the indiscriminate killing of civilians, starvation tactics, and destruction of non military targets like homes. The same rhetoric was used in WW2 to justify Dresden and Hiroshima. Nazis bad, we can kill Germans with impunity. Japanese bad, we can nuke a whole city or two.
It's interesting how most people can look back at those events and condemn them, or condemn the US brutal slaughter of indigenous tribal peoples, but somehow Israel gets a special pass and anyone who questions their conduct of war or occupation is pelted with ad hominems like being an antisemite.
It doesn't take a moral philosopher to understand two wrongs don't make a right.
If someone had stolen my house and plowed the olive groves that five generations of my family had farmed, and did that to thousands of others around me, and drove me into a fetid slum I could not leave and which is subjected to mass murder attacks every decade or so, I might be easy prey to a political party that promised to get tough with my attackers and get my land back, and would probably not really grasp I was voting for a gang full of vicious sociopaths with a very stupid approach to negotiation .
So tired of nuance-free discussions around the web where people seem to think Hamas just popped in out of nowhere and announced with a gleeful cackle, "Let's be evil and kill some innocent Jews!" Hamas and PIJ were created by the series of forcings and swindles that started with a letter written by Arthur Balfour. Was Balfour naive or foolishly optimistic or just having a feel-good moment with Britain's Jewish community? Maybe someone more knowledgeable of that history could say.