Six months have passed since the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Yet the bloodshed in Gaza has no end in sight. Israel is waging the longest, deadliest and most devastating war in its history in the territory, opening up a new and appalling stage of a conflict that has long been prisoner to its tragedies.
The past few months have confirmed the worst fears. Israel's army has responded to the terror spread by Hamas with new paradigms. Disproportionality has become the norm, obliterating the distinction between militia fighters and civilians. A report by an Israeli investigative website serves as an allegory for this: According to the site, an artificial intelligence had been tasked with selecting thousands of human targets based on the work of intelligence services which had seen neither any of the preparations for October 7, nor the gigantic network of tunnels dug by Hamas. And what was the result? Four months after taking over Gaza's largest hospital to track down Hamas fighters, the Israeli army has found it necessary to launch another deadly and particularly destructive assault on the hospital at the end of March. To be followed by the next one.
Under the impetus of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political survival depends on the destruction of Gaza having been just as unable to free the Israelis captured on October 7 as to eradicate Hamas, Israel is reoccupying the narrow strip of land after having stifled it for 16 years. The maximalism of the most extremist government in the country's history is not only creating a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale. It has also signaled the prevention of any reconstruction of Gaza, if by chance the weapons were to finally fall silent.
This Israeli drift was enabled by the blindness of the US, whose timid reservations were rightly taken for support. After the decimation of Palestinian civilians, journalists and humanitarians, it finally took the deaths of six foreigners employees of an American NGO, killed by successive Israeli drone strikes during a trip that had even been coordinated with the Israeli army, for President Joe Biden to speak out in anger. And to obtain what? A promise to facilitate the arrival of the humanitarian aid needed to prevent famine in Gaza. In other words, the bare minimum that would be expected of any democracy worthy of the name.
Joe Biden's bias, which may cost him his re-election in November, is not the only element to blame. It is important to also note the impotence that has deliberately been chosen by European governments, which has fueled criticisms of the flexibility of their moral principles. Arab countries that have signed normalization agreements with Israel have had no problem with what is happening in Gaza either. Russia and China haven't gone further than a very mediocre position of contempt toward the West.
The sum of these paralyzing forces has buried the very fragile hope that emerged after the first weeks of the war: The realization that only a political perspective could guarantee security for these two populations that are locked in hatred. Six months after October 7, 2023, hatred has triumphed like never before.