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Hamas is banking on short memories, lazy journalism and short fuses. The lies it told about the Al-Ahli al-Arabi Hospital event illustrate the war on truth that it conducts simultaneously with sadistic attacks on civilians. Hamas's attack on Israel constituted an encyclopedia of war crimes: Targeting civilians, rape, parading of corpses, burning people alive in their homes, torture, killing children in front of their parents and vice versa, kidnapping, and more. But Hamas knows that those atrocities will fade quickly from memory. They will be replaced by images of Palestinian civilians fleeing from their homes or weeping over the bodies of their lifeless children or surveying their smashed neighborhoods. After a few days of this horror, even people of goodwill will begin to forget their sympathy for Israel and demand that the killing stop. "What good does it do?" they will ask. "Aren't both sides equally at fault?"
But both sides are not equally at fault here.
Gaza is not occupied. But even if it were, it would not justify Hamas's crimes against humanity. Odd that Hamas defenders invoke the concept of "disproportionality" when decrying Israel's self-defense yet recognize no limits on Palestinian savagery in response to "occupation."
Well, some object, what about the blockade? "The oppressed people of Palestine broke out of the open-air prison!" exulted demonstrators in New York. Israel did not impose a blockade on Gaza in 2005. That happened only in 2007 when Hamas took power.
And in any case, the blockade was obviously ineffective.
Hamas deliberately placed its missiles and other military equipment in hospitals and schools to guarantee the maximum number of civilian deaths. They do this because they know -- even if many members of Students for Justice in Palestine don't -- that Israel holds itself to certain standards in war.
So isn't Israel also committing war crimes by making war on civilians now?
No. It is Hamas's fault that Israel must inevitably but unintentionally cause civilian deaths in the fight with terrorists. The entire war, with all the suffering on both sides, is the fault of Hamas.
Israel must fight back. As President Joe Biden put it, "Israel has the right, indeed the duty, to defend herself."
In a better world, the Gulf states, Iran, Turkey, the European Union and the United States would come together to provide humanitarian relief to Gaza's people. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to be urging something of the sort with the more reasonable actors in the region. The worst, like Iran, will of course do nothing to relieve the suffering they have caused.
This war is and will be a catastrophe for both Israel and the Palestinian people of Gaza. But only one side is to blame.