“Terrorists” itself is a bit of a sneaky choice of words, because it’s very vague but sounds very bad.

If they had to talk about deterrence, proportionality and the actual demands and interests of the various factions involved it wouldn’t sound so good for them anymore. Instead, it’s them vs. “terrorists”, being against them is being for “terrorists”, and any attempt to argue with that is doomed to scuttle in the semantic molasses of WTF it even means.

You can still not like Hamas for being brutal theocrats that don’t care about human rights.