The war in Gaza is a test for humanity


Standing by while a whole people gets massacred doesn’t absolve countries of their responsibility in that. There is complicity in silence.

 

A Palestinian woman holds the body of her 8-year-old daughter who was killed in an Israeli military strike on Gaza, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, 4 June 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Hamas-led Islamist fighters opened the gates of hell on 7 October 2023.

They stormed Israeli defences that also served to keep more than 2 million Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip and killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, committing atrocities and dragging some 250 hostages back into the enclave.

The bloodletting, the worst since Israel’s creation in 1948, shocked Israelis and Jews worldwide to the core and set off a global wave of sympathy for the victims.

The context of the prolonged suffering of Gaza’s own population, overwhelmingly refugees driven from their homes in what is now Israel, was mostly drowned out.

The 7 October assault prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition government to launch a war flagged as self-defence, but which was evidently also for revenge, not just on Hamas, but effectively on all Palestinians under Israeli occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem

Methodical destruction

Israel signalled its plans very early on. It has since systematically laid waste to Gaza, bombed, starved and humiliated its people and talked openly of driving them out.

With some brave, honourable exceptions, most Israelis have applauded the war, abandoning any sense of shared humanity with their millions of Palestinian neighbours.

Two days after 7 October, Israel’s then-defence minister Yoav Gallant said he had ordered a total siege of Gaza.

“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” Gallant said. “Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

President Isaac Herzog said militants and civilians in Gaza would be treated alike. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said. “This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved — it’s absolutely not true … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”

Netanyahu has been equally explicit, comparing Hamas to “Amalek”, a tribe in the Bible which the Israelites were told to eradicate. He blames Hamas for all civilian casualties.

Other ministers have urged Gaza’s total destruction — one proposed dropping a nuclear bomb — and expulsion of its people, as in the 1948 “Nakba” when several hundred thousand Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as part of Israel’s independence war.