As Resources Disappear, Gazan Civilians Face Mass Death Among Infants, Children, Pregnant Women, the Elderly, the Sick, and Over a Million Other Noncombatants With Zero Ties to Hamas

What’s unfolding now in Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe the world can’t ignore and America and Israel must work cooperatively to halt. Otherwise, hundreds of thousands of innocents may die.

{Note: To donate to a vetted list of nonprofit organizations engaged in humanitarian work in the midst of the current catastrophe in Gaza, see this link at CNN. Note that the images in the below report are not individually captioned; all are taken from the last week in Gaza and hail from reliable media outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NBC News.}

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Introduction

As breaking news from CNN confirms earlier reporting from major-media outlets in the Middle East—first curated in America by Proof—that indicted far-right Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in fact had prior warning of a major escalation in violence coming from the Gaza Strip well before the invasion of Israel by Hamas, conditions in Gaza have become a major focus of international attention.

The tragedy of what’s happening inside a narrow, cramped land area often called “the world’s largest open-air prison” is raised exponentially by the looming sense that the geopolitics-transforming effect of Hamas’s horrifying war crimes in Israel could have been significantly mitigated had Netanyahu acted responsibly to protect his people.

This report acts as an itemization of an unfolding human tragedy of epic proportions, and this Introduction as a discussion of foundational facts undergirding the tragedy.

About half of the 2.3 million residents of Gaza are children. Even before the Israel-Hamas War began, 70% of Gazans wanted Hamas to disarm—but were (and still are) in no position to make it happen. The Gaza Strip is so small that it’s approximately the size of two Districts of Columbia, even as its “built-up urban areas” are six times more densely packed than America’s capital city (see graphic below).

There is no escape from Gaza by land or sea. The tiny stretch of land is under a formal siege on all sides. To the north and east, 300,000 Israeli reservists surround it, a force representing more than 3% of the entire population of Israel. Were a similarly high percentage of the U.S. population to surround Washington, D.C.—or two districts of comparable size—the massed army would number 10.3 million soldiers. To the south, the Egyptian government is blocking Gazans from escaping to the Sinai Peninsula.

If indeed Gaza is “the world’s largest open-air prison,” it’s exponentially more so now—as where previously 18,000 Gazans left the Strip daily to work in Israel, now no one is allowed to leave for any purpose whatsoever. This only adds to the area’s population density, particularly in the urban areas where most of the hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli air raids and mortar attacks (one every third seconds, per France24) are falling.

And in a stunning development, the Netanyahu administration has now ordered the United Nations to evacuate the 1.1 million Gazans living in northern Gaza (north of the Wadi Gaza Wetlands) to leave their homes—likely forever—and evacuate to the southern portion of the settlement-cum-prison within 24 hours, a task that the UN immediately and understandably termed “impossible.”

The New York Times map below helps show why this evacuation order is inhumane as well as unprecedented (putting aside that the area that encompasses the two escape routes is under an unceasing bombardment by Earth’s fourteenth-strongest military):

MSNBC now reports that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are “ready” to invade the Gaza Strip via ground assault. As they stand at the cusp of doing so, Israeli airstrikes have already taken a horrifying toll on the local population in what Reuters reports is “by far the most powerful bombing campaign” in the 75-year-old, historically bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Per CNN, in just six days Gaza has suffered at least “1,900” killed, significantly more than this injured, and at least “430,000 displacements”—a euphemism for innocent refugees who have nowhere to go because their homes are gone or are now unsafe.

This figure represents almost 20% of all people in Gaza. It’s expected to skyrocket in the next few days.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has informed the over 300,000 very well trained and provisioned Israeli Defense Force (IDF) troops on Gaza’s border that the Netanyahu administration has formally “released all restraints” on their conduct once they enter Gaza—an obvious recipe for rampant war crimes. Indeed, in view of this development this headline from The Intercept cannot be seen as at all surprising:

This Proof report assesses the state of the critical resources needed by the innocent civilians in Gaza to stay alive. This is not a report about Hamas; that terrorist group’s formally trained military arm—known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades—is said by Israel to number only “several hundred” (and many members of this core group are presumed dead, given that 1,500 Hamas terrorists executed an “intricately planned assault” on Israel less than a week ago). Even if we now add to this number, as we most certainly should, the terrorist group’s 30,000 sympathizers and internal security guards, at its maximum strength—which it definitionally is not at—Hamas represents 1 of every 76 people in the Gaza Strip.

The other 75 people out of every 76—99% of the population of Gaza—have no Hamas affiliation whatsoever, and opposed Hamas’s militancy at a 70% clip even before the group’s unprecedented invasion of Israel led to Gaza staring down utter destruction.

And it’s not just utter destruction, either—but destruction in the most violent terms imaginable.

According to a news summary of a just-released report from Human Rights Watch (emphasis supplied)

Human Rights Watch has confirmed reports of Israel firing white phosphorus munitions during attacks on Gaza and along its border with Lebanon.

White phosphorus poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering, and its use as an incendiary weapon in civilian areas is a war crime.

All these harrowing developments complicate beyond description the emergencies in Gaza with regard to all of the essentials for human survival itemized by Proof below.

Food

Siege starvation is unquestionably a war crime, which puts allies of the Israeli people—which includes Proof—in an untenable position, as this is quite clearly what the government of Israel is now doing to Gaza in full view of its people and all the world.

Not only is Gaza under siege, but entry of food or water is being blocked by the IDF.

Nor can the intent of, and the animus behind, this war crime be deemed unclear. As Just Security reports,

“On Monday, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant announced, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

It doesn’t take a Literary Studies doctorate to see the bait-and-switch here. It may be the case that Hamas—a vile terrorist organization that clearly must be destroyed, at this point, by any means acceptable under international law—does comprise “human animals”, but Minister Gallant hasn’t limited his preannounced war crime to Hamas, but expanded it to the 75 out of every 76 Gazans who have nothing to do with Hamas.

And that matters.

As United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese has told international media,

“If [the cutting off of food from a population] is intentional and in the context of a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population, it also [in addition to a war crime] constitutes a Crime Against Humanity [a separate and even more serious offense under intentional law].”

Rapporteuer Albanese adds that less than one week into the Israeli offensive in Gaza, “Every rule of international humanitarian law ha[s] been broken” by the Israelis.

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As to food production inside Gaza, according to the United Nations, “The UN World Food Programme (WFP) [is]…together with UNRWA [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency]…deliver[ing] fresh bread from ‘bakeries still able to operate’ and food to over 175,000 displaced people across 88 [Gaza] shelters on Wednesday, with plans to ‘reach over 800,000 people across Palestine.’”

But this heroic effort is nevertheless insufficient, in large part for the most harrowing reason one could possibly imagine—because UN aid workers are being killed at scale.

The UN reports that in the last six days alone, at least a dozen UN aid workers trying to help stave off mass starvation in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes. And even attempts to relieve and reinforce these aid workers with new bodies are failing; UPI now reports that international aid organizations are desperately trying to get into Gaza with workers bearing food and medical supplies and have been unable to do so.

The horrifying photograph below is from this UPI report.

These civilian deaths notwithstanding, the food shortage in Gaza has now reached and passed catastrophic levels. According to this Reuters report, “food…[is] rapidly running out in Gaza.” What many Westerners may not understand here is that even before the war, a significant percentage of Gazans were on food assistance to survive, assistance that now is dwindling to nothing because there is no means to augment Gaza’s food supplies beyond whatever was on-hand when Hamas invaded Israel—an event that not only was unforeseeable to humanitarian aid workers but unforeseen by the 98.7% of the Gazan population (to be precise about it) that has nothing to do with Hamas and could not possibly have known plans that, as Proof just reported two days ago, it kept hidden from even its top allies in the region. Under such circumstances, how could those already struggling to find food have known it was about to disappear altogether? How could they have prepared themselves through rationing or hoarding?

They could not.

As Reuters explains, “In normal times, the UN…provides direct food assistance to some 350,000 Palestinians [approximately one in six Gazans] monthly, while also offering aid to nearly 1 million [other Gazans] in cooperation with other [non-UN] humanitarian partners via cash transfers [which additional aid thus comprises food assistance to an additional 43% of Gazans].”

The very longest a human can survive without food is 8 to 21 days, and many humans can’t go nearly this long without perishing; indeed, the usual figure given in studies of mass starvation is seven days. This is especially true for the very young and very old, as well as those who are already suffering from serious health conditions such as war injuries. It seems clear from public data that half or more of all Gazans already fall into that category of persons liable to perish within a week without any nourishment.

Water: Human Consumption

The average human will die if they have no water for 72 hours.

The Israeli government has cut off all water supplies to Gaza. Per this report by ABC News, which cites the United Nations World Food Programme, “residents in Gaza are expected to run out of food, potable water, and essential supplies in a matter of weeks.”

This is misleadingly optimistic, however—for the simple reason that by the time a population of 2.3 million has entirely “run out of potable water” there has already been mass death due to water deprivation because not all civilians have equal access to water, not all civilians can go the same period of time without water, and not all uses of water even relate to consumption—for instance, some water must always go to firefighting (see below) and far more to hospitals, for emergency medical procedures—so it’s likely that Gazans will begin dying of thirst before the first week of November.

This short timeframe is particularly harrowing given that the United States, one of the nations most likely to be in a position to both send humanitarian aid to Gaza and help marshal an international coalition to systematically do so, has no functioning legislative branch at the moment.

Until the Republican Party of Donald Trump is able to select a Speaker of the House, which it has now been unable to do for over a week and which American major media reports may not happen for weeks to come—CNN says there’s “no end in sight” to the total (not even partial) paralysis of the legislative branch of our federal government—there is no mechanism for Congress to send aid to Gaza were it even inclined to do so.

And that inclination is in itself unclear, as right now the GOP seems interested only in sending military equipment to the fourteenth-strongest military on Earth rather than food, water, medical supplies, or other humanitarian assistance to 1 million children who are about to run out of all of these essentials for survival.

And the situation is worse than even this.

As ABC News reports (emphasis supplied), “Gaza was facing a food security [and] water crisis before the most recent conflict began.” As the news network explains,

Thousands of years of conflict in the region has degraded the land [of Gaza], leaving “reverberating environmental effects” and making it nearly impossible for Gaza to produce its own food supply. The recurring periods of violence have led to high levels of disruption to infrastructure, particularly water and sanitation, as well as power plants.

So Westerners must understand that the water crisis that has hit Gaza—ABC News says water is already “scarce” as of today—is not striking a community equatable to a suburban enclave in New Jersey, but a semi-blighted landscape that even under the best local conditions imaginable would perpetually struggle to support human life.

As the network’s reporting explains (emphasis supplied, internal citations omitted for clarity),

There is no surface water—lakes or rivers—to draw from in the region. The only resource to extract water from is the groundwater. Therefore, the aquifer supplying water to the territory is over-extracted. Only about 4% of the water extracted from the aquifer is actually potable.

The lack of an adequate supply of clean water has been the focus of the argument on the actual habitability of Gaza for years. Nearly all of the drinking water in the territory is bottled.

About 80% of the population in Gaza was in need of humanitarian aid before the bombings began days ago.

Medical Care

According to this UN report, right now there are 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, with an estimated 166 babies due to be born every day in Gaza for months to come.

The UN reports that these 50,000 births will be “taking place with inadequate access to healthcare or even clean water.”

But the problem of medical care in Gaza goes beyond this unthinkable tragedy, as of course doctors and nurses in Gazan hospitals must worry about being killed at any moment in an Israeli airstrike as they attempt to save the lives of noncombatants through complex emergency surgeries—quite apart from the fact that they also lack water, fuel, antibiotics, pain medication, and even blood for emergency transfusions.

Meanwhile, observers say that Gazan morgues are “overflowing.”

NPR reports that the effect of the now-raging war on Gazan hospitals has been “devastating”, with some hospitals reporting that certain patients must be treated on the floor—because there are no beds for them—and the “smell of blood everywhere.”

What exacerbates all of this is the staggering population density in Gaza. If an Israeli bomb or missile goes astray—or is negligently or recklessly targeted to begin with, or is deliberately targeted at a location thought to be connected to Hamas that actually is not so connected—the likelihood is not just that there will be civilian casualties but mass civilian casualties because the people of Gaza, simply put, live so close together.

Moreover, Israeli attacks are much more likely than one might expect to strike at or near hospitals because, per IDF claims—as NPR details—“Hamas hides weapons and soldiers within and near hospitals and health facilities.” Is this true? It may or may not be, but certainly there’s no confirmation of the claim either way by either Hamas or the Israelis, with the result that the latter can justify any strike at or near a hospital facility by contending that it was a legitimate military target. NPR reports that “As of Thursday, the World Health Organization had documented at least 34 health care-related attacks—attacks involving health workers, facilities and ambulances—and warns that the health system in Gaza is at a breaking point.” NPR notes that at some hospitals the wait time even for emergency surgery is “days”, a macabre revelation that becomes more and more unthinkable the more one ponders it.

In an environment in which every hospital can be declared a potential military target, there’s virtually no chance of providing adequate medical care to pregnant women, children with shrapnel in their bodies, persons who are terminally ill, or the elderly. And all this would be the case even if these hospitals had adequate medical supplies.

But they don’t.

This NBC News headline tells the tale better than Proof can:

Harrowingly, one doctor in Gaza told NBC News that, within 48 hours of the Hamas invasion of Israel, the hospital he was working in “had already run out [of] or [we]re running out of supplies, especially consumables like gauze, antiseptic, sutures, blades and antibiotic ointment, things you need for burns.”

It’s now five days later, and we can safely assume that both this particular hospital and most others on the Gaza Strip no longer have those consumables at all—nor will they will getting more, as Israel is blocking all medical supplies from entering the besieged territory.

Electricity

The sole power station in Gaza stopped working two days ago, according to CNN. So most of the 2.3 million people in Gaza, 98.7% of them noncombatants, are now living in darkness.

But this horror aside—facing hundreds or even thousands of airstrikes from one of the strongest militaries in the world while living in darkness, all because a terrorist group whose militarism you and 70% of your neighbors categorically oppose, which you didn’t democratically elect, committed heinous war crimes in a neighboring administrative state—the lack of electricity in Gaza cannot be discussed without acknowledging that hospitals run on electricity. Sitting in darkness waiting to be bombed is one kind of horror; being a doctor or nurse trying to save the life of a child with shrapnel in his stomach without access to electricity is the stuff of nightmares.

As Haaretz reports, the failure of Gaza’s sole power plant was due to lack of fuel (see below for more).

This illustrates the “cascade effect” in any fast-collapsing human civilization. Fuel is required for electricity to be generated; without electricity, as Haaretz observes, there is a “stoppage of water supply”; without water, people quickly end up hospitalized and too week to produce or seek food; without food, hospitalizations increase further; and yet without fuel and electricity, hospitals cannot function—leading to the now “appalling conditions” in Gazan hospitals that Haaretz reports on here and which will now experience the cascade effect.

All of these life-and-death subnetworks—food, water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies, not to mention the human resources, such as humanitarian aid workers and doctors and nurses in local hospitals, that act as delivery mechanisms for these goods—are interconnected, meaning that the failure of one can collapse all the others and cause mass death on an unthinkable scale within a matter of weeks or even days (quite apart from the tragedies that unfold in a matter of seconds when a highly advanced military is bombing one of the most densely packed civilian living areas on Earth).

On top of all this, internet connectivity in Gaza is now at less than 20%, according to The Times of Israel—and is expected to end completely throughout Gaza on Saturday, October 14 (quite possibly because Israel plans to launch the first stage of its ground invasion tomorrow). This calls to mind another thing that electricity is often used for worldwide: to power the digital devices allowing a besieged population to tell the world about what’s happening to it as 300,000 heavily armed-and-armored troops are coming toward it in a stage of rage, “released of all restraints” by their government.

Water: Firefighting

Needless to say, buildings are now on fire across the Gaza Strip—including, according to CBS News, civilian buildings like schools, hospitals, and residential towers. There’s no indication that these fires can any longer be put out via firefighting operations.

According to this Thursday MSNBC report, “Israel’s minister of energy has announced that no…fire hydrants will be turned on…until the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas are released.”

The problem with this demand is self-evident: Hamas is an armed militant group that has little concern for who lives or dies in the Gaza Strip at this point, and those who need hydrants and fire trucks are civilians who lack the armaments to force Hamas to do anything. In sum, the people who need the hydrants aren’t holding the hostages.

Observers should assume that fires in Gaza can’t be put out going forward, even as or when they’re burning people alive, creating long-term structural hazards that will kill innocents in the future, or destroying critical nonmilitary infrastructure like hospitals or schools (though it probably should go without saying that no one knows when or if Gazan children will be able to go back to school).

Gazan civilians’ inability to fight fires would be less urgent a concern if they did not live in an area the size of two Washington, DCs that is currently being bombarded with bombs and missiles by one of the twenty strongest militaries on Earth.

ABOVE: Gaza residents are desperately trying to explain to the international community that “we’re not Hamas.” Thus far this seemingly obvious and self-evident truth has nevertheless fallen on deaf ears both in Israel and the West.

Fuel

In a crisis, fuel is needed to keep ambulances and fire engines running; to keep large generators at critical facilities like hospitals and power plants running; to allow any refugees who are unable to flee by foot due to age or infirmity to escape areas about to be bombed; or even—as is commonly the case in the Gaza Strip, now—to let civilian vehicles act as ad hoc ambulances when no properly equipped vehicles are available in the immediate vicinity because they have all been destroyed by missiles and bombs.

Israel’s minister of energy, Israel Katz, has said that not a single fuel truck will be allowed to enter Gaza until all Israeli refugees have been released, a declaration that has led the International Committee of the Red Cross to “plead” with Israel—thus far without any success—to allow fuel into the Gaza Strip for humanitarian reasons.

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Conclusion

Empathy for noncombatant Palestinian civilians and refugees appears to be at its lowest ebb ever in Washington, D.C., where it has been all too easy for Republican demagogues—desperate to turn Americans’ attention from the fact that they can’t form a functioning government—to conflate Hamas and Gaza, which truly ghoulish conflation is further enabled by the fact that the American death toll in the Israel-Hamas War has risen to 27 and the Israeli death toll has surpassed 1,300. In other words, there are new tragic, horrifying, and categorically unacceptable deaths for the party of Donald Trump to cynically exploit.

Meanwhile, a beloved Reuters journalist was just killed on the Israel-Lebanon border and thousands of Americans are now begging the U.S. State Department to help them get out of Israel. So emotions in the region couldn’t possibly be running hotter on all sides.

In the face of Hamas’s war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity—which clearly must result in the decimation of the terrorist group as quickly as possible—it will nevertheless be impossible for the Western world to ignore the war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity that appear to be unfolding inside Gaza at the hands of the IDF and the Netanyahu administration, acts that many Israelis demonstrably oppose.

ABOVE: The jarring headline for this recent Reuters report.

And we can expect pro-Palestinian protests to increase in number and expand in size around the globe. Unlike the first, risible ones—which sought to express support for the cold-blooded murder of civilian noncombatants by Hamas and even, in several cases, the genocide of the Jews in the Middle East and around the world—the coming protests will be responsible in their conception and just in their aim because that aim will be to stop the indiscriminate murder of innocents in Gaza. It is not so very hard, thankfully, to pull together a mass protest when the topic is saving the lives of infants, children, the elderly, the terminally ill, and adult noncombatants who are not just non-violent by nature but are trying their best to serve their communities: doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, firefighters, humanitarian aid workers, and the other categories of selfless civil servants who seek not to harm but aid each and every neighbor they can.

One worries, now, that such protests will become more and more dangerous—not due to their composition or ambitions, but because many in the West have overcorrected in the face of Hamas’s vile, inexcusable, unthinkable war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, failing to see that even those who believe in the existence of a Jewish state cannot stand by while children are brutally murdered. Indeed, in France the centrist government has now made all pro-Palestinian protests illegal; this may have seemed a (tenuously) tenable policy when President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers saw the possibility for large-scale antisemitic violence in protests that openly celebrated Hamas, but what will happen when these protests, instead, make their aim to end war crimes in Gaza even as they acknowledge the war crimes Hamas committed in Israel?

Just so, President Joe Biden and the White House have now had to walk back claims that President Biden saw images of children beheaded by Hamas at Kfar Azza. This embarrassment has (entirely wrongly) emboldened pro-Hamas protesters, even as it’s distracted the attention of many from the fact that this distinction doesn’t finally matter. Hamas murdering infants and young children in cold blood at point-blank range and in front of their families is undisputed, making the babies manner of death ultimately a macabre sideshow. Does a murdered baby care if it was decapitated or shot in the head? Those who know better should be avoiding disputes over the precise contours of a war crime to focus on the far more important fact that war crimes unquestionably took place inside Israel—lending righteousness to the current military operation to destroy Hamas—and that war crimes are now being perpetuated inside Gaza by Israel.

What Biden’s gaffe—admittedly, encouraged in bad faith by the Trumpist president of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, who’d naturally have little problem with his criminality as a peacetime and/or wartime politician redounding to Biden’s detriment rather than his ally Trump’s—confirms is that, as already noted above, the West is in the midst of a moral overcorrection that will shortly boomerang back against it. Just as the support progressives like myself express for BLM becomes a self-inflicted wound when certain BLM leaders issue antisemitic declarations, progressives’ understandable support for the only democracy in the Middle East—a nation-state that’s almost certainly the last best protection against a second Holocaust, given the history and present and likely future of global antisemitism—becomes an albatross when the Israeli government, largely led by far-right radicals in the Likud Party, engages in conduct that betrays not only core principles of American progressivism but, as importantly to the author of Proof and other American Jews, Judaism itself.

Fortunately, it seems that Biden is indeed now making a necessary pivot, as this CNN report suggests:

American Jews, American progressives, and the Democratic Party need to do what we have always done this century and with well-justified moral indignation: the opposite of whatever Christofascists, MAGAs, and the Republican Party are now doing with an abominable absence of grace, integrity, and empathy. Indeed, a recalibration of how Americans are perceiving events in Israel and Gaza is not just morally warranted but logistically urgent now that major conservative talking heads are advising America to go to war in the Middle East—partly as retribution for American deaths there, and partly to aid (though there is no evidence such aid is requested or desired) an Israeli military that appears to be having no difficulty whatsoever leveling Gaza on its own.

It will be no defense against accusations of war crimes for either Israel’s government or its people to do what their president, Isaac Herzog, has now done, which is try to justify the slaughter of innocent Gazans by insisting that every Gazan—presumably including the nearly 50% who are children, and the significant number who are elderly and well beyond fighting age—should suffer for Hamas’s actions because “they could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza.”

No historian believes this. History shows us that those with the guns (Hamas) make the rules, and this is especially so if, like Hamas, those with the guns are willing to kill the elderly, women, children, and other habitual noncombatants in the Middle East indiscriminately. Indeed, Hamas’s willingness to kill anyone at all without warning in Israel explains precisely why unarmed Gazans without an opportunity to vote for their leadership since 2006 weren’t positioned to rise up against those who, not for nothing, have kept their place as rulers of Gaza not only with their guns but with humanitarian aid that kept alive a significant percentage of the Gazan population.

A “coup” of the sort Isaac Herzog retrospectively insists on would have been a self-extermination. He is doing little more, here, than insisting that the Palestinians do themselves an even more egregious version of the work the IDF now seems ready to do on Netanyahu’s, Herzog’s, and Gallant’s orders.

Americans in particular are in no position to judge the Gazans in this way. Consider that we know precisely which members of Congress helped plot the events of January 6 and precisely which members of the Trump administration aided them. None have gone to jail, and in fact none were even charged with crimes until more than two and a half years after the violent, deadly domestic-terror-attack-cum-coup they and others were responsible for. Even today, with a minuscule number of the ringleaders charged, the bulk of the January 6 plotter class remains uncharged and one—Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH)—may be on the verge of becoming the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and second in line for the American presidency. So who are we to lecture a considerably more impoverished, considerably less armed, considerably more fractious, considerably less formally educated or healthy or safe population about taking on a homicidal terrorist bloc funded and armed by Russia and Iran?

And what about Israel, whose prime minister is a known career criminal currently under indictment? Why was it so hard for Israelis to cage him that he had to be put in charge of the country’s very destiny, instead? Facetiousness aside, the point is that overthrowing a violent autocratic regime and bringing it to justice is hard; avoiding war crimes when you have a civilian population entirely at your mercy is not merely comparatively easy but actually so. Yet there’s little indication Israel will take this path.

That Israelis have experienced one of the worst days in their history is clear. That war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity were perpetuated against Israel by Hamas is also clear. That an immediate, forceful, decisive military response to these crimes is needed is beyond question. But inside the United States, what is equally obvious is that a flailing GOP and morally repugnant, Islamophobic MAGA “movement” is now going to use the specter of killing Middle Eastern Muslims en masse to try to reverse is domestic fortunes. This would be a not just repugnant but transparent ploy if D.C. Democrats weren’t so concerned over its success that they have inadvertently begun mirroring it—desperately aiming to ensure they aren’t flanked on an issue of moment by their political adversaries. This sorry state of play leaves innocent noncombatants in Gaza, again about half of whom—we must not forget—are kids, without advocates either abroad or stateside. This can’t be allowed to continue.

Israeli intelligence agencies are among the best in the world. The Israeli Defense Force is among the best armies in the world. Israel has created a unity government. Gaza is besieged, surrounded, in the dark, and running out of fuel, food, medical supplies, and water. The Israelis’ chief cause—obliterating Hamas—has the support of the entire West. Even as bodies are still being recovered by the dozens in Israel-Gaza border towns, the military situation in Israel is relatively stable, skirmishes at the Israel-Lebanon border and a handful of Hamas militants remaining on Israeli soil notwithstanding. Now is precisely the moment for an international pause to (a) ensure the safety of innocents, and (b) carefully deliberate next moves. The Israelis ordering 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate the region in 24 hours, which CBS News calls “unprecedented” and the United Nations calls “impossible”, is no more temperate than “comedian” Greg Gutfeld calling for American warplanes to assist Israel in striking an already decimated Gaza or urging a violent revolution inside the United States.

The moment to be our best is when circumstances are at their worst. This has always been true, and it remains true today.