No modern war exposes the limits of morality and information more starkly than Gaza.
Any decent person recoils at Hamas’s butchery. Any honest observer can also see that Israel’s military response has created a humanitarian disaster of staggering proportions. Hamas could end the crisis tomorrow by releasing the hostages; nearly two years after October 7, only a handful have been freed, many in failing health. Meanwhile, civilians remain trapped under relentless bombardment, penned in with nowhere to run. Whole families are erased in seconds, neighborhoods reduced to dust, and children pulled from the rubble have become the defining image of this war. It is a catastrophe measured not only in casualty counts but in generations extinguished before they ever had the chance to live.
The informational battlefield is as murky as the physical one. Hamas controls nearly every statistic and image leaving Gaza, shaping them to serve its propaganda. Israel counters with disciplined PR teams that rush out competing claims—often credible, rarely conclusive. Reports break in the New York Times or Al Jazeera, only to be challenged or walked back within hours. Truth, here, is provisional. Both sides fight the information war as fiercely as the street battles. The difference is that Israel does so under a global magnifying glass, while Hamas benefits from an international press corps and allied governments predisposed to scrutinize Israel far more than itself.
I don’t write this as an armchair critic. I deployed to Iraq in 2009. By then, the worst of the insurgency had passed, yet even in that relative calm, I nearly shot civilians more than once. The difference between an innocent and an insurgent could collapse in a second. The IDF is operating under far harsher conditions. Hamas fires rockets from schoolyards, hides weapons in hospitals, and moves fighters through crowded neighborhoods. That doesn’t excuse every strike, but it shows the cruel reality of this asymmetry: every engagement risks pulling civilians into the line of fire. In such a war, tragedy isn’t an accident—it is inevitable, baked into the terrain itself.
What began as a legitimate military response to the rape and murder of Israeli civilians on October 7 has morphed into something far more complex: a humanitarian mission that the Israeli military is plainly unprepared to manage. I don’t believe the suffering we see is intentional. It is the byproduct of a war fought on too many fronts at once—counterinsurgency in dense urban terrain, the logistics of aid delivery, and the constant scrutiny of international media. Each layer compounds the next, and the result is a campaign where every action is received as partisan, no matter the intent. The IDF is trained to fight wars; it is not trained to run Gaza. And the gap between those missions is where civilians are dying.
Washington, meanwhile, has tuned out. The Trump administration, like most of Congress, sees little political gain in wading deeper. Americans rarely vote on foreign policy; those who do tend to fixate elsewhere. Even Trump’s fiery opposition to Biden’s Ukraine aid evaporated once he took office and quietly continued it. Gaza is not a hill this White House intends to die on. That political apathy is tragic. The constant stream of videos showing dead and maimed children should haunt any democracy that claims moral leadership. How many more children have to die before our government takes a stand? How many more videos of lifeless bodies pulled from the rubble must we watch in silence? The fact that we even have to pose such a question means we’ve already surrendered something essential—that flicker of humanity that should recoil instinctively at mass death. When morality is reduced to arithmetic, we are already lost.
The roots of this conflict stretch back far. The territory was Ottoman for four centuries, then a British mandate until 1948. The creation of Israel may not have been a perfectly conceived idea in 1945, but after the Holocaust it became a reality the world accepted. Eight decades later, Israel is a recognized state with nuclear weapons and global legitimacy. That cannot be undone. But Palestinians have legitimate grievances—and anyone who researches the last century can see they have not gotten a fair deal.
Too often, American officials ignore this imbalance. Consider Stuart Seldowitz, a former National Security Council staffer caught on video spewing vile, anti-Palestinian rhetoric in New York. If people like that shaped U.S. policy, is it any wonder Palestinians doubt our credibility?
Still, America must defend Israel’s right to exist. The rhetoric of Hamas and Iran offers no just world. But defending Israel does not mean endorsing everything it does. Nations act in their own interest; Israel uses U.S. support to advance its own agenda. That is not criminal, but it is geopolitics. Where our values align—against Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, Syria—cooperation makes sense. Where they don’t, blind loyalty only deepens the crisis.
Left unchecked, Gaza will breed a new generation of extremists who will not only despise Israel but blame America for enabling it. That is a strategic cost Washington refuses to calculate.
There is no clean solution. In a dream world, Jews and Arabs would share one state, as they often did before the rise of political Zionism. The only plausible path now is a two-state solution, yet few in Washington take it seriously. Until they do, the war will remain what it is today: a tragedy of human suffering, information warfare, and political neglect.