Israel’s Gaza Campaign Is Entering a Moral Abyss

For at least two weeks now, the press has told us with numbing repetition that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly dire. Phrases like this and other similar formulations that have been pushed on TV-watching and newspaper-reading publics have never been great for capturing the stark reality of devastation in this besieged territory in the first place; now, however, they ring grotesquely hollow.

Israel’s campaign of retribution for the murderous atrocities and hostage-taking committed by Hamas in its surprise Oct. 7 attack began amid shocking proclamations by that country’s politicians and diplomats that it would flatten Gaza and completely void the tightly ringed-in Palestinian territory of all traces of Hamas. Electricity and water supplies for Gaza’s 2 million-plus inhabitants were promptly severed, and for most of the time until now, humanitarian aid was cut off as well.

In the last few days, members of the international relief community have begun to find their voices in framing the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Speaking on MSNBC Tuesday night, Kavita Menon, the director of communications for Doctors Without Borders in the United States, called it “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes that we have ever seen.” The famously neutral and reserved International Committee of the Red Cross tweeted: “The human suffering is shocking. Thousands killed. People have limited access to food and water. Hospitals are near collapse. Hospital corridors are full of wounded and displaced. Destroyed infrastructure and homes will take years to rebuild. Even wars have limits.”

For the most part, news consumers in the United States and much of the West have been largely spared from witnessing the extensive and lingering destruction that Israel has visited upon Gaza and its inhabitants in day after day of aerial bombardment. One analysis estimated that as many as a quarter of the buildings in the territory’s north have sustained damage or been destroyed. These, for the most part, it is worth emphasizing, are buildings that housed human beings, well more than half of whom are women and children.

It is also worth stating that outside of these groups that are traditionally held as innocents in times of war, most Palestinian men in Gaza, too, are not members of Hamas, nor did they participate in the October attack against Israel. It must also be stated, finally, that contrary to its public denials, Israel has also bombed the southern half of Gaza, where it urged people from the north to relocate.

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Over the last two weeks, global humanitarian concern over reports of what seemed like the first single-event mass atrocity in the war since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack—the bombing of the al-Ahli hospital complex on Oct. 17—has dissipated amid a fog-of-war information battle between Israel and Palestinians and the allies and sympathy groups that line up between each of these sides. Attention to the horrific fact of likely a hundred or more deaths got subsumed by an unresolved blame game, although, as I have written, the available evidence at the time appeared to support the Israeli version of events.

With grim inevitability, this week brought a gruesome sequel: the catastrophic bombing of the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. The dropping of as many as six Israeli bombs left an enormous crater and crumbled concrete buildings in a wide circumference. But unlike the previous hospital bombing, in which no one claimed responsibility, Israel had to quickly acknowledge that it carried out the strike.

In what seems to reflect its understanding of the propaganda liability it could face for killing and wounding hundreds of Palestinians, Israel almost immediately claimed that it had committed this act in an effort to take out one of the Hamas authors of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and had indeed killed him. (The question of how it could have known this so quickly remains unresolved.) Israel’s de facto justification amounts to an argument that visiting death and devastation upon hundreds of innocent civilians is acceptable as long as the attempt to eliminate a loathsome villain is successful. Israel even doubled down on this justification after a second attack on the camp the following day, which Israel said killed the head of Hamas’s anti-tank missile unit.

Here lies the nub of the ethical dilemma at the heart of the present phase of this crisis, and the point at which Israel and the United States, its staunch backer from the outset of this crisis, have entered into a moral abyss.

In an editorial that appeared in the Wall Street Journal just one day before the first refugee camp bombing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that his country’s current offensive is a war against “the enemies of civilization itself.” The problem here should be obvious to all. The resort to barbarity, such as Israel has employed in its campaign to snuff out Hamas, is itself uncivilized, and surely plants the seeds for more savagery on both sides in the future.

The nature of Israel’s campaign was captured far better in words that Netanyahu spoke to a domestic audience than in the civilizational appeal he made to international public opinion in his op-ed. “Remember what Amalek did to you,” Netanyahu said, quoting Deuteronomy 25:17. The Amalekites, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, were an ancient enemy of Israel whose clashes with Israel are described in several books in the Hebrew Bible. The full passage from which Netanyahu quoted a line, Deuteronomy 25:17-19, reads:

Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you came out of Egypt, how he attacked you on the way when you were faint and weary, and cut off your tail, those who were lagging behind you, and he did not fear God. Therefore when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.

Netanyahu followed his quote with: “We remember and we fight.”

Netanyahu’s comparison of Hamas to Amalek was clearly meant to invoke Israel’s long history of persecution by external enemies. However, some online commentators saw it as a call to commit genocide against Palestinians because of another reference to the Amalekites that comes in the first book of Samuel. 1 Samuel 15:3 states, “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’”

Though Netanyahu didn’t actually cite this verse in his speech, for some, the seeming parallels between the indiscriminate violence it describes and the actions of the Israeli military in Gaza were unmistakable. Nor did Netanyahu’s comment come in isolation. Yoav Gallant, the minister of defense who called Israel’s Palestinian foes “human animals,” said of Gaza: “We will eliminate everything.” Galit Distel-Atbaryan, a Knesset member who until recently was minister of information under Netanyahu, vowed that Israel would “erase all of Gaza from the face of the earth,” adding that “the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory or they will die and their death will be evil.”

Some will certainly object that Israel had no choice in this matter, but I can only ascribe to that notion to a point. Israel certainly had the right to defend itself in the wake of Hamas’s clearly deliberate and despicable targeting of civilians and large-scale hostage-taking at the outset of this conflict. Of this there is no reasonable doubt. Hamas’s leaders, after all—despite having at times signaled potential acceptance of a two-state solution—remain openly committed to the violent destruction of Israel.

Like all nations, though, Israel must be held to the laws and conventions that regulate warfare, as well as to a common sense of decency and proportion. Biblical-style vengeance may be emotionally satisfying for some, and it may appeal strongly to the most religious elements of the politically embattled Israeli leader’s base, but this is a recipe for repeated and continued atrocities and the heedless violation of innocent lives. Ultimately, it is also degrading to Israel and all who support it.

The fact that it is hard to pursue Hamas militarily in the dense population centers of Gaza does not excuse Israel and those who are arming it, like the United States, from the duty to prosecute its war in a much more controlled and limited fashion. This is not just about bombings of refugee camps and other places where innocents are certain to die in large numbers, either. It is also about ensuring that civilian populations are not cut off from supplies of food, water, electricity, medicines, fuel for hospitals, and other essentials. How else can this be considered a righteous struggle?

Israel’s tactics raise profound doubts on another level as well. From the outset of the Gaza campaign, many have asked what will happen the day after, meaning once Hamas is wiped out, assuming such a goal can be attained. The previous deprivation of water, food, electricity, and fuel, some of which continues today, as well as the bombing of refugee camps raises questions about whether this war is really about essentially emptying Gaza altogether and forcing its Palestinian population to take refuge in Egypt. The existence of a document advocating such a policy, prepared by an internal Israeli government office, suggests that this has been under active discussion by at least some officials in that country. If these are unfounded rumors, as some will insist, Israel should rule this out publicly now, and the United States should continue to do so.

Any effort to displace the population into Egypt is a recipe for broadening this crisis, and not in the way we are usually warned of, meaning attacks from Iran and its surrogates in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. All along, Egypt has said that it will not accept any such endgame, and trying to force it to do so seems like a shortsighted and surefire way of undermining that country’s long-standing peace with Israel.

The only way to bring about a lasting settlement of the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians is to create peaceful avenues for expression and pursuit of self-determination among the Palestinians. That this seems almost impossible right now for many Israelis, who are still profoundly and rightly traumatized by the events of early October, does not mean that it can be avoided. Israel’s friends in the West need to demonstrate as much commitment to this as they have to defeating Hamas, otherwise this cycle of tragedy is sure to worsen.