What you described is Israel being a hostile country to Gaza and using its armed forces to do hostile actions. By your definition, NATO occupied Yugoslavia in 1999, and USA periodically occupies... MANY countries. Oh and ALL of Ukraine is currently occupied by Russia because their missile regularly hit all regions
Words have meanings!
I mean, they do, and the word you're looking for is "Bantustan" (though that's more accurately applied to the state of the west bank) or "Reservation" at its most charitable. If you think those were independent self-governed entities that weren't (or aren't, for the ones still around) militarily controlled by their possessing neighbor, I got bridges to sell you.
It takes more than just bombing to be occupying something; control over infrastructure, borders, and so on. The only reason Israel's control over that isn't
explicit is because they intentionally abandoned it instead of wanting clear responsibility for the mess Gaza had been turned into. It didn't remove that responsibility, Israel just very deliberately tried to abrogate it.
If the relation between Ukraine and Russia was like the one between Gaza and Israel, the situation in Ukraine would be a
hell of a lot worse than it is now.
Oh... and Israel doesn't just strike Gaza for no reason. It always happens in retaliation to attacks coming from Gaza. Retaliation, not punishment. Plain and simple self-defense.
It's consistently grossly disproportionate and aimed -- from what I recall, with explicit acknowledgement of it by leadership within Israel -- at collective punishment of the gaza population, not retaliation against any particular attack. It's why the IDF is so fond of targeting civilian infrastructure and residential buildings even when they're
entirely aware the actual military impact of doing so is somewhere between minimal to non-existent and actively detrimental. It's neither plain, nor simple, and only the barest fig leaf of self-defense.
But... OK... let's assume that Gaza is not an existential threat at all... it is just a threat that is, evidently, capable of killing over 0.01% of your population in a single strike. Should Israel just ignore this "small nuisance?" If not, in what way do you propose to negate this non-existent threat?
Look to south africa, to a number of other places with similar conditions. It would not be clean because there's no clean solution
left at this point, and probably hasn't been anything even approaching one since the israeli far-right murdered Rabin at the absolute latest, but integration of a bantustan or something adjacent to, but hopefully more functional and less abusive than, the US or Canada treatment of the natives, is probably the only option that doesn't lead to the eventual genocide of most or all of the relevant palestinian populations. Israel has been incredibly clear it's
not going to stop fucking up the populations in the west bank and gaza, so it needs to get off its ass and take responsibility for the authority they're practicing.
Which'll be a mess, but if folks keep shitting the bed for decades eventually you're going to have a bloody mess to clean up.
... beyond that, the problem with considering the scale of population impact, is that Israel has been inflicting comparable amounts of casualties to the west bank and gaza populations on a scale that averages out to that kind of damage
yearly, nevermind the deprivation and general abuse that's not directly fatal. For decades. Hamas managed a strike that did more damage to the population of Israel than has been inflicted in one go for most of its history, and that amounted to around a year, or less, of the damage Israel's been inflicting on the west bank and gaza -- and it took the IDF being remarkably stupid for it to happen. That attack being as bad as it was wasn't because of Hamas competence or capability, it was because the IDF decided fucking with people on the west bank was more important than keeping a terrorist group under wraps. It's not a "small nuisance", but there's no way in hell Hamas actually takes down Israel.
It's the difference between a terrorist group let run rampant over an open air prison and an actual nation with a fairly significant military. The two are not an equivalent threat to each other, not by a very,
very long shot.
And you are completely missing my point. I am saying that it is absurd to even take into account if people were killed or not. Intent is what matters when you determine what is a justified response, not a result. I see no difference in the moral evaluation of an action that tried to kill thousands and an action that managed to kill thousands.
Then you've got a problem in regards to moral evaluation of this conflict -- because Israel has both tried
and managed to kill thousands,
repeatedly, so you're dealing with at best equivalent moral actors. If there's no moral difference between those things, then there's no moral difference between the fuckers that toss a grenade into a nursery and the fuckers that pulp a family with a pressure wave, especially if both groups have significant voices calling for mass slaughter and the removal, by grave or eviction, of the relevant populations.
... though, I guess in fairness, to some extent I wouldn't even disagree with that. If hell exists, the leadership of israel and much of the IDF and the settler groups will be standing in it shoulder to shoulder with hamas and their fellow travelers when their times come.