If I had to guess I'd say the last option. I'm no expert in this by any stretch, but it seems to me that Israel's general response is to go many orders of magnitude in excess of what wronged them. An eye for an eye? More like a thousand eyes, ears, noses, and why not just obliterate a thousand heads and have done with it, for an eye.
That line, which I just made up, is possibly also somewhere in Leviticus.