On Wednesday, Israelis said that their army should not back off its unrelenting offensive to crush Hamas, despite the U.N. General Assembly’s ceasefire call, the growing list of troop casualties and a spiraling Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

Israel’s military suffered one of the deadliest days in the two-month-old Gaza war on Tuesday, with a colonel among 10 soldiers killed, bringing the toll to 115 — almost double the number killed during clashes in the coastal enclave nine years ago.

And with much of the enclave laid to waste, conditions dire and more than 18,500 Palestinians killed in the Israeli army’s air and ground assault, President Biden said the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gazan civilians was costing Israel international support.

Polls in recent weeks show overwhelming backing for the war despite the rising human costs. Six Israelis who spoke to Reuters on Wednesday said now was not the time to back down, regardless of fading global sympathy reflected in Tuesday’s U.N resolution.

“The sense of the people is that this is a threat to the very existence of Israel,” said political scientist Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute, which conducts regular opinion polls on the war. She said that people were prepared for more deaths of soldiers.

Speaking in Jerusalem, retiree Ben Zion Levinger said Israel’s enemies would view any slowdown in fighting Hamas as a sign of weakness.

“If we don’t take this fight to the end, then tomorrow morning we’ll have battles in the north and in the east and the south and maybe Iran,” said Levinger, a former IT worker. “Therefore, we have no choice.”

Although the cost was “terrible,” the goal of the military operation was the total destruction of Hamas infrastructure in Gaza, Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chair Yuli Edelstein said in an interview.

Hamas said the killing of soldiers on Tuesday showed Israel would never achieve its war goals in Gaza.

“The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”

“Collateral damage”

After a week-long pause in hostilities in November, more than three-quarters of Israelis said the offensive should resume without adjustments that would reduce either Palestinian civilian casualties or international pressure, according to a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Israeli media reporting of the war dwells less on the civilian cost in Gaza than international coverage does. Hermann said that while views on Palestinian casualties varied depending on Israelis’ political leanings, some people felt the deaths were an acceptable price to pay for future security.

“There is a sense of first revenge, mainly on the right, and on the left and the center they see it as I would say secondary to the achievements of the war… it is being perceived as collateral damage.”

Only 10 percent of Israelis thought the army was using too much firepower, according to a Tel Aviv University poll conducted in late October among 609 respondents, with a 4.2 percent margin of error.

Jerusalem resident Adam Saville, who works at a non-profit academic institution, said Israel was doing what it could to avoid killing non-combatants.

“It’s awful. It’s awful that there are so many civilian casualties, he said. “But this is war, and that’s what happens in war.”

Hostages

A goal of Israel’s war is to bring back the hostages grabbed by the militants and taken to Gaza.

Israel says at least 19 of the 135 remaining hostages are dead, and two bodies were recovered this week. Around 100 of the hostages were released during a week-long truce in November.

Portraits of the hostages with the slogan “bring them home” are pasted on walls and bus stops and projected on public buildings across Israel.

Unsurprisingly given the unstable situation, polling shows Israelis are unsure what a long-term solution would look like. However, the Israel Democracy Institute survey says more than 40 percent of citizens think the country should pursue the creation of a separate Palestinian state after the war.

Almost 60 percent of Israelis, including 40 percent of Arab Israelis, cited destroying Hamas in any way possible as the most important goal of the war, according to the Tel Aviv University poll.

Around a third said bringing the hostages home was the main goal.

“Right now, we didn’t achieve neither the first nor the second,” Hermann said. “Most people are ready to continue until the point where at least one of the major aims is achieved.”

— Reuters. Edited for style.