The New York Times states that we need to not kill children in order to protect others
Loved ones of Hamas attack victims diverge over Israel’s war on Gaza: Be’eri, Israel, on the edge of the Gazan border
BE’ERI – To walk the streets of the small village of Be’eri in southern Israel nowadays is to relive the horrors from the single deadliest attack on civilians in Israel’s 75-year history.
The streets of this once close-knit community are now lined with partially destroyed homes. Some were burned, some were blown open. The walls are covered in blood. In another, two childrens’ rooms are filled with books, binders, stuffed animals and paint supplies. White bed frames with blood stains cover the mattresses.
There is a road leading into a kibbutz where the bodies of Hamas militant are taken by a backhoe.
The Israeli military has been taking journalists through this village recently to give a glimpse of what happened when Hamas sneaked into Israel undetected, storming several communities, killing 1400 people and taking 200 hostages.
Many residents of the towns hid inside safe rooms waiting for Israeli forces to rescue them. For hours no one showed up. When it was finally over and they emerged, the scene was unlike anything they’d ever seen before.
More than a week after the Hamas attack, survivors are still waiting to identify their loved ones and plan their funerals.
“We’re still figuring out how we’re going to handle so many funerals,” Alom told Morning Edition. “We don’t know where to bury them because it’s not safe.”
“I just don’t know how to deal with it,” he said “For more than four or five hours we were slaughtered and no one came to help us. I don’t know who is to blame. I know we’ve been slaughtered.
The fate of a Palestinian man killed in the 1967 Gaza-Israel conflict and Israel’s determination to end the war on a humanitarian basis
Their anger is not yet aimed so much at the government for its intelligence failure or Israeli forces for their delayed rescues, but toward the Palestinian enclave.
Tel Aviv is a beautiful city with graffiti that reads, “Destroy Hamas.” Israelis have been shattered by the Hamas terrorism and kidnappings, an attack that felt existential and explains the determination to dismantle Hamas, whatever the cost. While Tel Aviv is calm, Gaza is a dangerous place to live in and likely will lead to worse things.
Miles away from the border with Gaza, sitting in a Jerusalem cafe, 27-year-old Noy Katsman said they wants the war to stop. They knows Alom’s pain but wields it differently.
Katsman lost their brother, Hayim, 32, in the village of Holit about a mile from Gaza. Hayim was hiding in the closet when Hamas militants shot him and was one of 30 Americans killed in the attack.
Hayim was a peace activist. He wrote a doctorate on the dangers of the right wing in Israel and was critical of the government for uplifting extreme anti-Arab voices.
That’s why Katsman believes their brother, despite his tragic killing, “would say we should never kill innocent people” and would encourage Israelis to re-think the long-term repercussions of retaliation.
“My government, instead of saying, ‘Okay, we failed, maybe we need to do something else,’ they’re saying, ‘Oh, we need to kill more Palestinians. “Now we need to destroy Hamas,” said Katsman. Right-wing politicians who use violence and hate gain power while the people who gain from it are the ones who suffer. But we lose from it.”
“You have to understand how people feel,” they said. “And if after they kill us, a thousand people, we are going to kill three thousand of them, that’s not an understanding of people, because these people will grow up and hate us even more.”
“That’s the problem – Israelis only care if something is pro-Palestinian or pro-Israel,” they said. This is not something to do. People die. The people die from both sides.
To respond to a provocation with no good remedy in the crisis in the Middle East is a test of our humanity. And in this test, we in the West are not doing well.
The suggestion that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas is implicit and I want to challenge it. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.
Israel has suffered a terrible terrorist attack that deserves support from the world, but it should not be excused from taking care of its own people. Bravo to Biden for trying to negotiate some humanitarian access to Gaza, but the challenge will be not just getting aid into Gaza but also distributing it to where it’s needed.
What do we think of the Biden administration calling for more aid for Israel and more aid for Gazans? We can use defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system, but the idea that we will pay for humanitarians to mop up blood caused by our weapons is questionable.
What about the Gaza doctor who lost his wife and son in a bombing and had to treat his injured daughter? He had to grieve the bodies of his loved ones and so he did not have time to care for his niece or sister.
In his speech on Thursday, Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. It’s fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.
I doubt we Americans would shrug and say: Well, Putin started it. Too bad about those Russian children, but they should have chosen somewhere else to be born.
Is Hamas Lives on the Line? The Case of Israeli Families in the Light of Israel’s Left-Right Symmetry
I think that view is a reflection of a mistake. While I would love to see the end of Hamas, it’s not feasible to eliminate radicalism in Gaza, and a ground invasion is more likely to feed extremism than to squelch it — at an unbearable cost in civilian lives.
The best course of action is to cling to our ideals, even in the face of provocation. That means that despite our biases, we try to uphold all lives as having equal value. Some children are not worth as much as others. That is not moral clarity but moral myopia. We must not kill Gazan children in order to protect Israeli children.
