Most of them actually did simply flee to get away from the battles with the hopes of returning after the arabs manage to kill all israelis. the number of jewish that were forced to leave their homes is double than that. i don't see us claiming iraqi and iranian oil fields. this was a war. if they had won, we would have been massacred.
if you had conducted a poll of "would you want to kill palestines?" (not hamas terrorists), i'd bet it would be a sweeping No. while in gaza, that might be a yes (nurtured by hamas, regardless of israel)
Even for sake of argument, we assume this is the case, so what?
I don't honestly give a damn if they WANT to or not. I care, as Darvi pointed out, that they're DOING it.
Dead innocents are dead innocents. They're not any less dead if you killed them with good or bad intentions (not that I even agree that they WERE good intentions by anybody involved. Again, this is for sake of argument). And the number of dead Palestinian innocents is hugely disproportionate to the number of dead Israeli innocents. Especially considering the much smaller population they have to spare, this is, simply factually, closer to Israel "driving them into the sea" than the other way around, by far. When you add in displacement not just death, that phrase becomes even more lopsidedly opposite of what you're suggesting.
Actions speak louder than words.
Why are you not counting israelis displacements?
And yes, intentions are everything, because intentions specifically say loudly, that if israel could have, it would have spared those civilians. the problem is they couldn't do so because israel NEED to remove the terrorist threat. as i said, the fact hamas is bad at killing civilians does not let them be considered the moral ones, nor does it reduce the justification for israel to remove the real, imminent threat. and since no israeli soldier have ever used an israeli civilian as a shield, while every hamas operative does or did that, then the lives of those civilians are on the hands of Hamas. the sooner the world begin to realize that, the sooner their lives could be improved.