Whenever I write about the war in Gaza, I hear from pained readers who agree with me on most topics, but believe I judge Israel far too harshly. So let me try to meet them on their own terms and explain why I believe American support for this war is a moral and practical catastrophe, doubly so now that Israel is planning another major drive into the territory.
These are among the arguments that I hear from many of you who in good faith disagree strongly with me:
Yes, the suffering in Gaza is horrific, but you’re blaming the wrong party. Hamas started this war and Hamas can end it tomorrow by surrendering, giving up its weapons and returning the hostages it is still holding.
On many visits to Gaza over the years, I’ve seen Hamas’s misrule, misogyny and brutality. Israel was justified in responding militarily to Hamas’s horrific attack on Oct. 7, 2023. I would celebrate if Hamas were forced out of Gaza. But that’s almost certainly not happening, and it’s not clear what military objective the slaughter and starvation today are advancing.
More than 600 retired Israeli security officials have said, “Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.” Families of Israeli hostages have warned that continuing this “endless war without purpose” endangers the lives of those hostages.
True, the war would end if Hamas surrendered; that’s true of the other side in any war. But enemies rarely oblige, and Hamas’s unwillingness to surrender cannot justify what Israel has done with American complicity: the killing of an estimated 18,000 children, the starvation of a population and the leveling of entire neighborhoods. According to UNICEF, Gaza has the highest proportion of child amputees in the world.
I’ve covered many wars in my career, and Gaza is distinguished by its pointless destructiveness — at least 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Add to that the fact that the United States provides weaponry, other forms of military assistance and diplomatic cover to Israel that contribute to a war effort that includes a series of incidents that seem very likely to be war crimes.
You cite these numbers as if they are undisputed facts. But that number of 18,000 dead children comes from a health ministry overseen by Hamas — why should we trust it? And starvation is disputed. Why can’t you acknowledge that the situation on the ground in Gaza is more murky than ideologues claim?
I’ve talked to Gazans and to doctors and aid workers who have worked there. They all agree that Gazans are starving and dying of starvation. At some point, trying to dismiss hunger in Gaza amounts to a denial of a shameful reality.
It’s true that humanitarian organizations sometimes exaggerate — some were premature in 2024 to say that famine was already underway — but that is a reason for relentless empiricism and skepticism, not for crediting self-serving assertions by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
When Hind Rajab, a 5- or 6-year-old Gazan girl, was killed, I held off writing about the case because Israel denied responsibility, and I wasn’t sure what to believe. Additional information later emerged, strengthening the case that Israeli troops killed Hind, six members of her family and the paramedics trying to rescue her. There have been too many incidents like that, such as the killing of 15 emergency workers in March, leaving the Israeli government’s credibility in tatters.
As for how many have been killed, those numbers are indeed uncertain. Many experts believe they actually understate the total: One study published in The Lancet suggested that the official Gaza death toll through June 2024 undercounted deaths by 41 percent. UNICEF says 80 percent of those who have starved to death in the war are children.
You’re neglecting this: Gazans slaughtered and tortured Israelis, yet now Israelis are feeding Gazans. And you think the moral failure here is by Israel?
I believe Hamas committed war crimes. But war crimes by one side in a conflict do not justify war crimes by another.
Israel has this year attempted to bypass aid agencies by providing food through the newly created Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The upshot was that hundreds of people were killed as they desperately tried to get food. Doctors Without Borders put it this way: “This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.”
Critics of Israel engage in double standards. Whatever you think of Israel’s behavior in Gaza, more children have starved to death in Sudan’s famine, and more people were butchered in the 2020-2022 war in Tigray, Ethiopia. Yet where is the outcry about Sudan or Tigray?
You’re right.
However, that point cuts both ways. The Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel also received far more global attention than the killings of hundreds of thousands in Tigray, or the reports that an estimated 120,000 women were raped there. If you argue that the world is disproportionately obsessed with suffering in Gaza relative to other conflicts around the world, then isn’t that also true of suffering in Israel?
I’ve traveled twice in the last year to cover the famine in Sudan and agree that it deserves more attention. But Gaza feels more personal because my tax dollars — our tax dollars — seem to be underwriting mass starvation there.
The practical impact of critiques of Israel is to reward Hamas and encourage antisemitic attacks on Jews worldwide. The killing of two Israeli Embassy staff members in May, the attack against supporters of Israel in Boulder, Colo., in June — these arise when critics of Israel employ inflammatory language.
Yes, I worry about that. Violence against Jews and supporters of Israel cannot be justified, full stop. And: While we ache at attacks on innocent Israelis, American Jews and Jews throughout the world, how can we not feel similar anguish at the deaths of innocent Gazans? A Palestinian child is the moral equivalent of an Israeli child and of an American child. And if you care about human rights only of Israelis or only of Palestinians, then you don’t actually care about human rights.
After 9/11, the United States invaded two countries, and in World War II you Americans roasted civilians in Dresden and Hiroshima. And now you call for restraint?
Yes, people overreact when they’re traumatized by an attack. That was true of Americans after 9/11, of Israelis after Oct. 7 and of Palestinians in their decades enduring dispossession. Overreaction to trauma is an explanation, but not a justification.
To their credit, some Israeli human rights groups and citizens have stepped forward to protest the horrors of Gaza. They should inspire all of us. What’s most important is not whether we are pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian; it’s that we be anti-massacre, anti-rape and anti-starvation.
Indeed, it’s the United States, which in this case cannot claim post-terror trauma as an excuse, whose behavior I find particularly inexcusable. Both President Joe Biden and President Trump have provided the weapons and diplomatic cover to perpetuate this tragedy, and they refused to use the leverage of those arms transfers to try forcefully to end the war.
For almost two years, Americans have seen what was going on in Gaza, yet our leaders enabled mass killing and starvation. Gaza represents not some distant and inevitable tragedy, but our own moral and practical failing. We have blood on our hands.
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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