Trevor Noah suggests Israel shouldn't retaliate against Hamas attacks because it's not 'a fair fight'

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Liberal "The Daily Show" host Trevor Noah suggested Tuesday that Israel should not retaliate against Hamas terrorist attacks, likening the conflict to a teenager fighting back against his annoying little brothers.

Noah tackled the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on his show, where he knocked Israel for its strikes on Gaza following rocket attacks by the Hamas terrorist organization, in their most serious fighting since the 2014 Gaza War.

"I just want to ask an honest question here," Noah said. "If you are in a fight where the other person cannot beat you, how much should you retaliate when they try to hurt you? Honest question."

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Noah compared the situation to when his younger brothers would fight him when he was a teenager, and his mother admonished him not to strike back since they couldn't hurt him.

"As a person who has immensely more power, I had to ask myself whether my response to this child was just or necessary," he said.

Critics jumped on Noah for downplaying efforts by Palestinian jihadists to kill Israeli civilians, regardless of their technology.

Israeli strikes and Hamas rocket fire this week have so far killed 56 Palestinians, including 14 children, and seven Israelis, including one child, according to Palestinian and Israeli officials, the Wall Street Journal reported. Israel’s military said at least 25 of those killed were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants. 

Noah said he could not look at the disparity in casualties and see a "fair fight."

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"Israel has one of the most powerful militaries in the world," he said. "They can crush Gaza like that, not to mention one of the most advanced defense systems in the world."

The comedian acknowledged he wasn't trying to provide an answer to the intractable conflict, providing a brief, flawed history of the geographical tensions at play. 

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"The history of the conflict and the region is far too complicated to come up with easy answers, a point which Noah inadvertently underscores by claiming that the British took this land from the Palestinians. (They took it from the Turks running the Ottoman Empire, and divvied up the region with France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement.)," HotAir's Ed Morrissey noted.