as dumb as it is to kill civilians, they do have a point with that loophole, if that loophole (which exists irl too) wasnt there, then war could never happen, because the defender can just strap a bunch of civilians to themselves and legally never be attacked, so there needs to be some loopholes for war to actually progress beyond endless slaughter in the fields, the war has to end at some point, and if a loophole to allow killing *some* civilians to end the war exists, it should be taken, so that more people dont die in the war
look at this chapter here, the republic CLEARLY are using the citizens as human shields, so the citizens should be angry at the republic after the war, sadly, citizens never look that deep and will assume the empire is evil when in reality their hands were tied.... tied by the republic themselves no less
kind of the reason america nuked 2 large civilian cities.... the reason they did that wasnt to be evil dicks, but rather that the other option was a full scale invasion of japan, which was estimated to have almost double the number of deaths, so they took their chances at nuking 2 civilian cities in order to get a surrender so less people will die in the invasion