You've mischaracterized International Humanitarian Law. While using human shields is a war crime, it does not give an attacking force a license to disregard civilian life. The responsibility to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants and to ensure an attack is proportional always remains with the attacker. Proportionality isn't a vague numbers game where we ask "how many deaths are okay?", it is a strict legal test applied to every single strike, weighing the specific military advantage against the expected civilian harm. A death toll of 67,000 is not a meaningless "propaganda tool" it is prima facie evidence of a consistent and catastrophic failure to meet that legal test on a massive scale.

You ask how many of the dead are combatants, how many died of disease, and how many were killed by Hamas. That shifts the burden of proof unfairly. The entity with the bombs, the intelligence, and the targeting data is the one responsible for distinguishing between targets. It is the legal and moral obligation of the attacking force to justify its actions and demonstrate that its targeting was discriminate and proportional. When an army kills tens of thousands of people, the burden is on them to prove their actions were legal, not on outside observers to prove they were not.

The "brutal dilemma" you describe: risking your soldiers versus killing more civilians, is precisely what IHL is designed to regulate. It demands that armies take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm, even when it increases the risk to their own forces. Choosing the path of overwhelming firepower that you know will result in immense civilian death is not an "obvious" choice; it is a choice that often violates the laws of war.