A man carries a child, wounded by Israeli airstrikes, into a hospital in Gaza City on October 11, 2023.

 (Photo: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)

“Where is the outrage we saw when Israeli children were killed?” asked a co-founder of IfNotNow.

JESSICA CORBETT

Oct 11, 2023 (CommonDreams.org)

Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes across the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ weekend attack have killed at least 1,100 people in the besieged enclave, including 326 children, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said Wednesday.

Gaza-based Hamas launched a major surprise attack against Israel on Saturday, a Jewish holiday, and the Israeli death toll has now surpassed 1,200. The far-right Israeli government and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded with Operation Swords of Iron, bombing Gazan residential, medical, and educational buildings, and intensifying a 16-year blockade of the region.

Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), which has documented cases of over 2,400 Palestinian kids killed by Israeli forces and settlers since 2000, has so far confirmed 105 of the 326 deaths.

“Intensive Israeli bombardment throughout the Gaza Strip, lack of electricity, Israeli airstrikes on telecommunications infrastructure, and the unprecedented rate of daily child fatalities has resulted in a lag between confirmed fatalities by DCIP and the overall total child fatalities published regularly by the Ministry of Health in Gaza,” the group said.

Responding to the new Ministry of Health figure, Yonah Lieberman, a co-founder of the American Jewish group IfNotNow, asked on social media, “Where is the outrage we saw when Israeli children were killed?”

DCIP’s Miranda Cleland said that from her time with the organization, she has learned that “all the dead Palestinian babies in Gaza won’t humanize Palestinians to the Israeli war machine, funded by the U.S. government, cheering on their killings.”

GAZA UPDATE: Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 326 Palestinian children in Gaza. @DCIPalestine has been able to confirm 105 Palestinian child fatalities in Gaza, including six-month-old Diaa' Ahmad Abdulati Salah from Jabalia refugee camp. https://t.co/tN3cZtIlE0 pic.twitter.com/4hEEXYNFgD

— Defense for Children (@DCIPalestine) October 11, 2023

The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid under a 10-year deal from 2016. U.S. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that his administration had begun sending additional assistance and he will seek further support from Congress.

The American group Jewish Voice for Peace argued Wednesday that “the U.S. must work to immediately de-escalate to prevent the further loss of life, and not fuel and exacerbate the violence by sending more weapons to Israel. There is only one way to end violence: to address its root cause, 75 years of Israeli military occupation and apartheid. We must end U.S. complicity in this systemic oppression.”

Some members of Congress have spoken out against Israel’s recent killing of Palestinian civilians. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Wednesday that while he welcomes the Biden administration’s offer of “solidarity and support to Israel” following Hamas’ deadly attack, “we must also insist on restraint from Israeli forces attacking Gaza and work to secure U.N. humanitarian access.”

“The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it. Israel’s blanket denial of food, water, and other necessities to Gaza is a serious violation of international law and will do nothing but harm innocent civilians,” he stressed. “Let us not forget that half of the 2 million people in Gaza are children. Children and innocent people do not deserve to be punished for the acts of Hamas.”

The population of Gaza is about 2 million. Nearly half are children.

Millions of innocent people cannot be made to pay for Hamas’ horror.

Collective punishment is a war crime. So are blockades to food and water.

We cannot allow dehumanization to descend into further atrocity. https://t.co/fRnbV29lVU

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 11, 2023

Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP, noted Wednesday that the IDF is expected to continue ramping up its operation.

“Israeli forces are destroying entire neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip as an apparent full-scale ground assault is imminent,” he said. “Immediate humanitarian relief is necessary to protect civilians as Israeli forces prepare to intensify attacks and Israeli officials declare their intention to commit further war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is seeking $104 million to provide humanitarian aid across the Gaza Strip and beyond over the next couple of months.

“What is unfolding is already an unprecedented humanitarian tragedy. Whatever the circumstances are, rules apply in times of conflict and this one is no exception. Aid to civilians who have nowhere to flee must be immediate: water, food, medicine,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Wednesday. “It is of utmost urgency that access to humanitarian assistance and protection be upheld for all civilians.”

Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), this week has also emphasized the necessity of ensuring access to humanitarian aid in the region, along with denouncing all recent attacks on civilians, especially kids.

“I am also deeply concerned about measures to block electricity and prevent food, fuel, and water from entering Gaza, which may put the lives of children at risk,” she said. “I remind all parties that in this war, as in all wars, it is children who suffer first and suffer most.”

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JESSICA CORBETT

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

And from Haaretz.com:

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

–Netanyahu

[Note: This an opinion piece by New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, and does not reflect the editorial opinion of the Bathtub Bulletin. –m.z.]

OPINION

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Oct. 11, 2023

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

The terror attacks by Hamas against civilians who were in their homes and dancing at a concert are being called Israel’s Sept. 11, and that’s a fair comparison.

Let’s hope that Israel responds to this outrage more wisely than we in the United States did to the attack on our country.

There’s a lot of loose talk about eliminating Hamas, and Hamas deserves it. As a journalist who has traveled repeatedly to Gaza, I’m appalled by the sympathy that some Americans and Europeans have shown for a misogynist and repressive terror organization like Hamas. If you care about human rights, you want to see Hamas eliminated.

Yet dismantling terrorist organizations can be harder than it looks and can raise troubling moral questions about collateral damage. The Taliban also deserved elimination, yet in the end it was the United States that was eliminated from Afghanistan. I worry that Israel may charge into Gaza with a ground invasion as thoughtlessly as we plowed into Iraq.

Neal Keny-Guyer, a former chief executive of Mercy Corps, knows Gaza well and thinks it is possible for Israel to kill or capture most Hamas leaders. “But at what cost to civilian lives?” he asked me. He noted that street fighting might well spill over into an uprising in the West Bank and a war on the Lebanon border as well.

Gaza is half the size of New York City and home to some 2.2 million people, almost half of whom are children. Global sympathies are overwhelmingly with Israel in the aftermath of the terror attacks, as they should be, but will that be sustained if a ground invasion leads to thousands of Gazan children dying in house-to-house fighting?

Israelis grieving their dead may not care. The Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur argues that the country has undergone a tectonic shift and is now determined to do what it takes, whatever the cost.

“A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot,” he wrote in The Times of Israel on Sunday. Israeli officials have struck a similar tone.

“We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” said the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Another official was quoted as saying that Gaza would be turned into “a city of tents.”

Rabbi Jonathan Jaffe in Chappaqua, N.Y., issued an open letter noting that Jews have been traumatized by the terror attacks. “Now, Israel will act like any other country would if it was invaded by a bloodthirsty neighbor and its citizens murdered, tortured, kidnapped and mutilated,” he wrote. “And when the world inevitably protests the Jewish use of force, we won’t care.”

I empathize with that trauma and anger. Who can watch the video of Shani Louk, a 22-year-old woman kidnapped by Hamas and paraded half-naked and badly injured in Gaza, and not feel rage?

Yet this mood reminds me of the aftermath of Sept. 11 in the United States, when we sailed into trouble. I wrote column after column warning of the risks of invading Iraq, but Americans brimmed with pain, confidence and resolve. What we needed was a companion dose of humility.

The Middle East is an ongoing education in such humility. Israel originally helped nurture Hamas in Gaza because it thought religious leaders would hang out in the mosque and be less dangerous than nationalist ones. Likewise, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 inadvertently laid the seeds for Hezbollah on the northern border.

There’s a reason that four successive Israeli prime ministers have chosen not to invade and occupy Gaza. Urban combat is a nightmare, whether for Americans in Falluja or Russians in Grozny, and civilian casualties are often enormous. That’s particularly true in a place like Gaza, where civilians cannot flee.

If we owe a moral responsibility to Israeli children, then we owe the same moral responsibility to Palestinian children. Their lives have equal weight. If you care about human life only in Israel or only in Gaza, then you don’t actually care about human life.

What that means in practice is difficult to navigate. Israel has a right to respond, and in war, civilians inevitably suffer.

“Today I woke up to see my neighborhood completely wiped off, including the building where I have my apartment,” Wafa Ulliyan, a Gazan aid worker who immigrated to Canada a few years ago, told me. “It became ashes.”

Ulliyan said she doesn’t want to see either Israelis or Palestinians targeted but just wants two states to live in peace. I’ve met plenty of people like her in Gaza — although of course there are also some who celebrate when rockets targeting Israel go off.

I flinch when I hear the defense minister refer to Palestinians as animals. Hamas dehumanized Israelis, and we must not dehumanize innocent people in Gaza.

There will be no optimal solution in Gaza, any more than there was in Afghanistan or Iraq. We are fated to inhabit a world with more problems than solutions, and it’s fair to feel conflicted about next steps. Israel will face hard choices in the coming weeks; its challenge will be to respond to war crimes without committing war crimes.

We don’t want to replicate in Gaza the approach reportedly expressed by an American Army major in Vietnam in 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

The counsel we Americans should offer Israel is threefold and admittedly difficult to follow. First, Israel has right on its side when it goes after its assailants. Second, urban combat has a poor record in achieving its goals — and a considerable history of horrendous casualties. Third, if your moral compass is attuned to the suffering of only one side, your compass is broken, and so is your humanity.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Nicholas Kristof joined The New York Times in 1984 and has been a columnist since 2001. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for his coverage of China and of the genocide in Darfur. You can follow him on Instagram, Facebook and Threads. His forthcoming memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.”  @NickKristof • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning Our Moral Compass to Suffering on Both Sides. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)