essay about war in israel

What's the Israel-Palestinian conflict about and how did it start?

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WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF THE CONFLICT?

What major wars have been fought since then, what attempts have there been to make peace.

WHERE DO PEACE EFFORTS STAND NOW?

What are the main israeli-palestinian issues.

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Israel-palestine Conflict: Historical Context, Causes, and Resolution

• Categories: Israeli Palestinian Conflict

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Published: Jan 31, 2024

Words: 612 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Historical context, causes of the conflict, major parties involved, international involvement, consequences and impacts, attempts at resolution, current situation and future prospects.

• United Nations. "Israel-Palestine Conflict: An Overview." https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/israel-palestine-conflict/
• BBC News. "Israel and Palestinians: The Conflict Explained." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-43789452
• Council on Foreign Relations. "The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/israeli-palestinian-conflict

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• Introduction

What led up to October 7

The october 7, 2023, attack, october 2023: air campaign, october–november 2023: ground invasion and beginning of the humanitarian crisis, december 2023–january 2024: pressure mounts for a ceasefire, february–april 2024: invasion of rafah looms, may–june 2024: rafah invasion, operation arnon, and pressure for a ceasefire, july 2024: hamas drops key demand, poliovirus detected, and hamas and fatah strike a unity deal, israel and iran exchange direct strikes in april 2024, escalation with iran’s “axis of resistance” in july 2024, global reaction to the war.

Israel-Hamas War

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Recent News

Israel-Hamas War , war between Israel and Palestinian militants, especially Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), that began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a land, sea, and air assault on Israel from the Gaza Strip . The October 7 attack resulted in more than 1,200 deaths, primarily Israeli citizens, making it the deadliest day for Israel since its independence.

More than 240 people were taken hostage during the attack. The next day, Israel declared itself in a state of war for the first time since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The war began with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducting air strikes on the Gaza Strip, followed weeks later by the incursion of ground troops and armored vehicles. By early 2024 tens of thousands of Gazans had been killed and over half of the buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed or damaged.

In 1948 the State of Israel was created on land inhabited by both Jews and Arab Palestinians. Hostilities between the two communities that year led to a mass displacement of Palestinians. Many of them became refugees in the Gaza Strip , a narrow swath of land roughly the size of Philadelphia that had come under the control of Egyptian forces in the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war . The status of the Palestinians remained unresolved as the protracted Arab-Israeli conflict brought recurrent violence to the region, and the fate of the Gaza Strip fell into the hands of Israel when it occupied the territory in the Six-Day War of 1967.

In 1993 there was a glimmer of hope for a peaceful resolution when the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reached an agreement on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state ( see two-state solution ; Oslo Accords ). Hamas, a militant Palestinian group founded in 1987 and opposed to the more conciliatory stance taken by the PLO, rejected the plan, which included Palestinian recognition of the State of Israel, and carried out a terror campaign in an attempt to disrupt it. The plan was ultimately derailed amid suicide bombings by Hamas and the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist. In 2005, in the wake of the collapse of the peace process, Israel unilaterally withdrew from the settlements it had constructed in the Gaza Strip after 1967, and in 2007, after factional conflict within the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas emerged as the de facto ruler in the Gaza Strip. The takeover by Hamas prompted a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt and set the stage for the next decade and a half of continued unrest.

The first major conflict between Israel and Hamas, which included Israeli air strikes and a ground invasion, took place at the end of 2008. Hostilities continued to break out, most notably in 2012, 2014, and 2021. Among the factors complicating those hostilities were the high population density of the Gaza Strip and the proliferation of subterranean tunnels there. Those tunnels were used by Hamas and other Gazans to sidestep the blockade, to conduct operations, and to hide from Israeli forces, and they were difficult to detect or destroy, especially when constructed under urban dwellings.

These conflicts were devastating for the Gaza Strip and came at a high human cost for Gaza’s civilians. But they usually lasted only weeks, resulted in few Israeli civilian casualties, and weakened Hamas’s military capacity. Hostilities often resulted in ceasefire agreements that temporarily eased Israel’s blockade and facilitated the transfer of foreign aid into the Gaza Strip. Many officials in Israel’s defense establishment maintained that Hamas had been effectively deterred by years of conflict and that an occasional flare-up of violence would be manageable. On October 7 the error of that assumption became tragically clear. Ongoing violence in the West Bank, political turmoil at home, and simmering tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon were among the distractions that left Israel unprepared for the onslaught from the Gaza Strip.

In early 2022 militants from the PIJ and new, localized groups in the West Bank , a territory northeast of the Gaza Strip that is also predominantly inhabited by Palestinians, conducted a string of attacks in Israel. The IDF responded with a series of raids in the West Bank, resulting in the deadliest year for the West Bank since the end of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising; 2000–05). The IDF targeted PIJ militants in the Gaza Strip—but left Hamas alone. In turn, Hamas refrained from escalating the conflict, bolstering the assumption by Israeli officials that they could prioritize other threats over Hamas.

At the close of 2022, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office as Israel’s prime minister after cobbling together the most far-right cabinet since Israel’s independence, which proved to be domestically destabilizing. The cabinet pushed for reforms to Israel’s basic laws that would bring the judiciary under legislative oversight; the polarizing move led to unprecedented strikes and protests by many Israelis, including thousands of army reservists, concerned over the separation of powers . In August 2023 senior military officials warned lawmakers that the readiness of the IDF for war had begun to weaken. All the while, provocations by Hezbollah were raising the risk of conflict along Israel’s northern border.

But while tensions were brewing at home, Saudi Arabia —which had long conditioned diplomatic relations with Israel on the conclusion of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process—had begun negotiating with Israel and the United States on an Israeli-Saudi peace deal . Although Saudi Arabia sought concessions on issues related to the Palestinians, the Palestinians were not directly involved in the discussions and the deal was not expected to satisfy the grievances of the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many observers believed that disrupting those negotiations was one of the goals of Hamas’s October 7 attack.

That deal was part of a broader regional transformation. The United States, which had long been the driving force behind the peace process, sought a “pivot to Asia” in its foreign policy and hoped an Israeli-Saudi deal would reduce the resources it needed to devote to the Middle East . Iran , meanwhile, was consolidating an “axis of resistance” in the region that included Hezbollah in Lebanon , Pres. Bashar al-Assad in Syria , and Houthi rebels in Yemen . Hamas, whose relationship with Iran had been tumultuous in the 2010s, had grown closer to Iran after 2017 and received significant Iranian support to build up its military capacity and capability.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas led a stunning coordinated attack , which took place on Shemini Atzeret , a Jewish holiday that closes the autumn thanksgiving festival of Sukkot . Many IDF soldiers were on leave, and the IDF’s attention had been focused on Israel’s northern border rather than on the Gaza Strip in the south.

The assault began about 6:30 am with a barrage of at least 2,200 rockets launched into Israel in just 20 minutes. During that opening salvo, Hamas used more than half the total number of rockets launched from Gaza during all of 2021’s 11-day conflict. The barrage reportedly overwhelmed the Iron Dome system, the highly successful antimissile defense system deployed throughout Israel, although the IDF did not specify how many missiles penetrated the system. As the rockets rained down on Israel, at least 1,500 militants from Hamas and the PIJ infiltrated Israel at dozens of points by using explosives and bulldozers to breach the border, which was heavily fortified with smart technology, fencing, and concrete. They disabled communication networks for several of the Israeli military posts nearby, allowing them to attack those installations and enter civilian neighborhoods undetected. Militants simultaneously breached the maritime border by motorboat near the coastal town of Zikim. Others crossed into Israel on motorized paragliders .

About 1,200 people were killed in the assault, which included families attacked in their homes in kibbutzim and attendees of an outdoor music festival . That number largely comprised Israeli civilians but also included foreign nationals. A March 2024 United Nations report found evidence that some were victims of sexual violence before they were killed. Adding to the trauma was the fact that it was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust .

More than 240 others were taken into the Gaza Strip as hostages. Many of them were taken from their homes and some from the music festival. Including Israelis with dual citizenship, more than half of those taken hostage collectively held passports from about two dozen countries, effectively pulling several countries into the efforts to release their citizens.

At 8:23 am on October 7 the IDF announced a state of alert for war and began mobilizing its army reserves (eventually calling up more than 350,000 reservists over the next several days). Two hours later, IDF fighter jets began conducting air strikes in the Gaza Strip . On October 8 Israel declared itself in a state of war, and Netanyahu told residents of the blockaded enclave to “get out now. We will be everywhere and with all our might.” On October 9 Israel ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, cutting off water, electricity, food, and fuel from entering the territory.

As Israel conducted air strikes, international efforts were made to secure the release of the hostages. Qatar , which in years past had coordinated with Israel on the delivery of international aid packages to the Gaza Strip, became the key mediator, but in the first weeks of the war it managed to negotiate the release of only four of the people held by Hamas. Gaza’s subterranean tunnels—forming an intricate web of passageways extending hundreds of miles—added to the difficulty of locating the hostages as well as targeting militants and their weapons caches: destroying the tunnels without high civilian cost proved difficult, and conducting military activity inside the tunnels presented a high risk for all those inside, especially for the IDF troops and the hostages who might be held there. Just three weeks after Hamas’s assault on October 7, more than 1.4 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had become internally displaced, and, with numbers of Palestinians killed still climbing by the thousands, it had already become the deadliest conflict for the Palestinians since the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

At the end of October Israeli ground forces advanced into the Gaza Strip. Communications in the territory were initially cut, restricting the ability of militants to coordinate but also limiting the ability of paramedics and humanitarian organizations to attend to emergencies. Unlike in previous conflicts, the ground invasion was slow and the number of armored vehicles and personnel was increased gradually. On November 1 the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt was opened, under conditions agreed to by Egypt, Hamas, and Israel, to allow a limited number of foreign nationals to evacuate the territory for the first time since October 7.

On November 22 Israel’s war cabinet agreed to a prisoner exchange with Hamas, which was mediated by Qatar and Egypt, that would coincide with a temporary pause in fighting. During the pause, which lasted seven days, 110 of the hostages were freed in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. In the days after fighting resumed, Israeli forces moved into Khan Younis, the largest urban center in the south of the Gaza Strip and the location of the homes of senior Hamas leaders, including Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif. A large number of civilians fled to Rafah , one of the last areas in the enclave for civilians to shelter from the ground invasion, and within weeks more than half of the Gaza Strip’s total population had crammed into the city along Egypt’s border.

By year’s end international pressure weighed heavily on Israel amid the high number of civilian casualties and wide destruction in the Gaza Strip. In mid-December U.S. Pres. Joe Biden , during a fundraising event for his reelection campaign, said that Israel was beginning to lose international support. In early January 2024, after nearly 23,000 Palestinians had been reported dead (a number that included mostly civilians but also Hamas fighters), Israel announced a change in strategy that would result in a more targeted approach. By the end of January the average number of daily deaths was one-third of what it had been in October but was still more than three times that of the 2014 conflict, the deadliest in the Gaza Strip until 2023. (By late July, the number of Palestinians reported dead approached 40,000.)

In late January a framework emerged through the mediation of Qatar, Egypt, and the United States for a potential three-phase pause in fighting during which a comprehensive agreement to end the war would be negotiated. The pause would include the release, in stages, of hostages held in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian prisoners taken by Israel since the start of the conflict. But the framework remained elusive as Hamas insisted on guarantees that the hostage exchange would lead to a permanent ceasefire.

Israeli officials in February announced their intent to extend the war into Rafah , leading to concerns internationally over the high humanitarian cost of such an operation. Netanyahu insisted , however, that an invasion of Rafah would proceed to root out “the last bastion” of Hamas battalions. A rift between Netanyahu and Biden came out into the open as Biden mulled withholding military support if an invasion of Rafah were to go forward without a comprehensive plan in place to protect civilians. In mid-March the IDF said that it would evacuate a portion of the civilians in Rafah to “humanitarian islands” that it would set up in the center of the Gaza Strip. On March 25, for the first time since the outbreak of the war, the United States refrained from vetoing a resolution by the United Nations (UN) Security Council that called for an immediate ceasefire.

On April 1 several vehicles carrying aide workers for chef José Andrés ’s World Central Kitchen were hit in an Israeli air strike. The seven workers were killed, and the deaths brought increasing scrutiny on the actions of the IDF in the wake of the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The IDF took responsibility for the deaths with a government spokesman describing the incident as “a terrible chain of errors.”

Early that same month, Hamas rejected a ceasefire proposal that would require it to release 40 living hostages who were female, children, older people, or sick in the initial stages, saying it did not have 40 such hostages. At the end of April, as the IDF readied the Gaza Strip for an evacuation of Rafah, Hamas released videos showing proof of life of three hostages.

Although negotiations seemed to be progressing at the beginning of May, talks broke down on May 5. Hours later, Hamas fired rockets at Israeli soldiers who were stationed near the Kerem Shalom border crossing, the main avenue for humanitarian aid. The attack killed four soldiers and prompted Israel to close the crossing to aid convoys. The next day, Israel ordered the evacuation of 100,000 Palestinians from Rafah . That evening, Hamas accepted a ceasefire proposal tendered by mediators that included efforts toward a “permanent cessation” of hostilities, but Israel reiterated its stance that it would reject any proposal that insists on an end to the war.

Meanwhile, Israel’s war cabinet unanimously authorized the military to proceed with its plans for Rafah. Israeli forces began moving to take control of the Rafah border crossing and the Philadelphi Corridor and on May 14 they entered the city. Within days the number of people who had fled Rafah since May 6 exceeded 800,000, and the areas they escaped to were deemed inadequate by international observers.

On May 17 a floating pier constructed by the United States for international humanitarian aid received its first shipment, but the distribution of aid was repeatedly disrupted by safety concerns and weather damage. It was operational for a total of only 20 days before use of the pier was abandoned in mid-July. In that time, the total amount of aid delivered through the pier fell slightly short of what is needed to sustain the Gaza Strip’s population for just one day.

On June 8 Israeli special forces rescued four of the hostages who had been kidnapped at the music festival in an operation that was conducted in central Gaza. The raid took place in two buildings in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the middle of the day. When the four Israelis were recovered alive and unharmed, the Israeli officers gave word to their commanders by radio: “Ha-yahalomim be-yedeinu” (“The diamonds are on hand”). Heavy fighting took place as the special forces escaped with the rescued hostages, and more than 270 Palestinians in the vicinity were killed as air strikes aimed to shield the Israelis. The officer who led the mission, Arnon Zamora, was critically wounded and died shortly afterward; the operation was renamed Operation Arnon in his honor ex post facto.

When the rescued hostages revealed that they knew in captivity that protesters were fighting for their release, demonstrators took to the streets in major cities across Israel that night to celebrate the rescue, call on the government to do more to bring the remaining 120 hostages home, and call for Netanyahu to be replaced as prime minister. The following day Benny Gantz , an opponent of Netanyahu who was also a key figure in his war cabinet, carried out a threat made weeks earlier to resign if Netanyahu had still not articulated a plan for the hostages to be released and end the war.

On June 10 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2735. It called for an immediate ceasefire, a release of hostages, and the safe distribution of humanitarian aid, followed by a permanent end to hostilities in exchange for the release of remaining hostages and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. The resolution, which was drafted by the United States and followed a ceasefire plan outlined by Biden weeks earlier, was passed with 14 votes in favor; Russia abstained, saying it had questions about the details of the U.S.-drafted resolution.

In early July Hamas and Egyptian officials who were involved in the ceasefire negotiations reported that Hamas had dropped its demand for Israel to commit to a permanent end to hostilities. As talks continued, Israel intensified its operations in Gaza. On July 13, an Israeli strike in Khan Younis targeted Mohammed Deif, Hamas’s top military commander. The strike killed Deif, according to an intelligence assessment by the IDF, and about 90 other Palestinians.

The war’s toll on public health was highlighted on July 21 when the IDF announced that it had found poliovirus in sewage and would offer vaccines to its soldiers. It also coordinated with international groups to assess the risk of polio among Gazans and administer vaccines. Observers noted that the Gaza Strip’s lack of sanitation and clean water, alongside its crumbling health care system, would make disease a lasting challenge for the enclave long after the war subsides.

On July 23, as Netanyahu arrived in the United States to address the U.S. Congress , Hamas, Fatah (the Palestinian faction that leads the Palestinian Authority), and 12 other Palestinian factions agreed to a reconciliation deal, which was brokered by the Chinese foreign ministry. The agreement would attempt to bring unified governance to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip , which have been split between Fatah and Hamas rule, respectively, since 2007. It was not immediately clear, however, how the “Beijing Declaration” would differ from past failed attempts at reconciliation , such as those in 2011, 2014, and 2017.

Conflict outside the Gaza Strip: West Bank, Hezbollah, Houthi forces, and Iran

Although the fighting was by and large centered on the Gaza Strip, it was not confined to that territory. The IDF also intensified its raids in the West Bank , blockading several urban areas, and in October it conducted a strike by warplane in the territory for the first time since the second intifada (2000–05). Attacks on Palestinians by vigilante Israeli settlers increased as the number of gun permits and weaponry in the settlements proliferated. Skirmishes with Hezbollah near the Lebanese border threatened to open a second major front, although both the IDF and Hezbollah appeared hesitant to escalate the fighting. Attempts by Houthi forces to strike southern Israel—an unusual target for the Yemen -based movement—using both missiles and drones also gave early indication that there was some level of coordination among the Iran -led “axis of resistance” during the war.

Israel and Iran entered into direct confrontation in April 2024. Israeli warplanes struck Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus , killing, among others, senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force , which provides aid, support, and training for the Iran-led axis . Two weeks later, in a retaliation that Politico Magazine and other observers considered to be “ designed to fail ” in order to avoid escalation, Iran fired into Israel hundreds of drones and missiles, most of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow 3 antimissile systems (along with help from American, British, and Jordanian forces). Israel retaliated days later with an attack near a military complex in the Iranian city of Isfahan ( Eṣfahān ), which includes facilities involved in its nuclear program; Iran downplayed the incident and claimed it had intercepted the strikes.

Regionwide tensions escalated again in July, despite reports that Israel and Hamas had been close to a ceasefire:

• Israel and the Houthi movement in Yemen: On July 19 a Houthi drone struck Tel Aviv , killing one person and wounding several others after it traveled undetected for 16 hours from Yemen. The following day the IDF retaliated with an air strike on Hodeidah , a Houthi-controlled port that is critical to the import of both weaponry and humanitarian aid to the war-torn country .
• Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon: On July 27 a rocket that was launched from Lebanon killed 12 children of the Druze community in the northern Golan Heights region, where much of the tension between Israel and Hezbollah had been centered since 2022. Hezbollah denied responsibility, but on July 30 the IDF responded with an air strike in Beirut that killed Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander who had been involved in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings .
• Israel and Iran : On July 31 Ismail Haniyeh , Hamas’s political chief abroad who was leading Hamas’s delegation in the ceasefire negotiations, was killed by a covert Israeli operation. The assassination took place in Iran’s capital, Tehrān , where Haniyeh had attended the inauguration of Iranian Pres. Masoud Pezeshkian the day before. According to The New York Times , Ali Khamenei , Iran’s supreme leader, ordered a direct attack on Israel in retaliation.

The October 7 Hamas attack drew widespread condemnation from around the world and was denounced for its terrorism against civilians by many, including the governments of many Western countries as well as India , Japan , and South Korea . Some foreign ministries, especially those of several Arab countries as well as Turkey , Russia , and China , refrained from condemning Hamas specifically and instead urged restraint. In the war’s initial stages, U.S. Pres. Joe Biden pledged unequivocal support for Israel, and on October 18 he became the first U.S. president to visit Israel while it was at war.

Concerns were also raised over the potential of the war taking on a global consequence, particularly as attacks by Houthi fighters on ships passing through the Red Sea disrupted global shipping and U.S. troops in the region faced attacks that, at times, proved deadly.

But as the war led to a deepening humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, Israel faced significant international pressure to allow limited aid into the territory. Pressure for a ceasefire also intensified as the war dragged on. Some opponents of the war lodged accusations of genocide against Israel as the war moved to the southern half of the Gaza Strip, and in December 2023 South Africa sought an injunction from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to prevent violations of international genocide conventions. The following month the court ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent genocide, including enabling humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip. In May 2024 South Africa filed an urgent request to the ICJ over the Israeli offensive in Rafah ; two weeks later, the court ordered that Israel “immediately halt its military offensive” in Rafah.

The intense emotions surrounding the war led to a wave of anti-Semitism , Islamophobia , and anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. In the first several weeks of the conflict, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 312 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, up from 64 incidents reported in the same period in 2022. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded 774 complaints of Islamophobia in the United States during a similar period, up from 63 total reported incidents in August.

The atmosphere at American universities during the war was under particular scrutiny as protests prompted concerns about students’ safety and freedom of speech . In April 2024, as Columbia University ’s president testified before the U.S. Congress about the university’s handling of anti-Semitism, pro-Palestinian activists at the university erected an encampment on campus calling for the university to divest from Israel ( see Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions [BDS] ). Students at dozens of other universities followed suit in the weeks ahead, causing significant disruption as graduation season approached. Incidents of anti-Semitism at some of the encampments and confrontations with counterprotesters amplified concerns over safety and security, leading to the dismantlement of many of the encampments and disciplinary measures, including arrest and suspension, for some of the protesting students.

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Guest Essay

I’m Going to War for Israel. Palestinians Are Not My Enemy.

By Nir Avishai Cohen

Mr. Cohen, a major in the reserves of the Israel Defense Forces, is the author of the book “Love Israel, Support Palestine.”

I was in Austin, Texas, for work on Saturday when I received a call from my commander in the Israel Defense Forces to return to Israel and head to the front line. I didn’t hesitate. I knew that the citizens of my country were in real danger. My duty first and foremost is to join the fight against those who unleashed a massacre on my people. I boarded the first flight I found out of Austin to head home to join the I.D.F. reserves, where I serve as a brigade operations command officer.

During my long flight to Israel, my mind couldn’t rest. I was trying to write down my feelings and thoughts about everything happening — and everything that’s about to happen — in my beloved country.

Little by little, the dimensions of the horrors of the most brutal attack that Israelis have experienced since the establishment of the state were being revealed. Hundreds of Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 people, including women, children and older people. About 150 citizens and soldiers have been taken captive. There’s nothing in the world that can justify the murder of hundreds of innocent people.

But I’d like to say one thing clearly, before I go to battle: There’s no such thing as “unavoidable.” This war could have been avoided, and no one did enough to prevent it. Israel did not do enough to make peace; we just conquered the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, expanded the illegal settlements and imposed a long-term siege on the Gaza Strip.

For 56 years Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to oppressive military rule. In my book “Love Israel, Support Palestine,” I wrote: “Israeli society has to ask itself very important questions about where and why the blood of its sons and daughters was spilled. A Messianic religious minority has dragged us into a muddy swamp, and we are following them as if it were the piper from Hamelin.” When I wrote these words last year, I didn’t realize how deep in the mud we were, and how much more blood could be shed in so little time.

I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.

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• Israel-Hamas War

Ben Stiller: Why I Can’t Stay Silent About the Suffering in Israel and Gaza

W hat a time we are all living through. Like so many people, I have been watching the awful events happening in the Middle East over the last year and trying to determine how to react. I have been seeing the brazen antisemitic incidents in my own city and feeling a mix of anger, fear, and astonishment that we are at this place in our country. Saying nothing at this point feels like I am betraying my own conscience. But what do you say? How does one express the complicated and very real feelings in this scary world of social media, where it seems any sentiment opens you to online vitriol from one side or another? The issues we are dealing with are so nuanced and complicated that short statements cannot in any way express fully what I want to say from my heart. As a public advocate for refugees, I’ve been struggling to reconcile my silence with that work. Please bear with me as I explain. And to be clear, what I say here is my personal view, not that of any organization–it’s just how I feel.

I was given the opportunity in 2016 to work with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, a global organization dedicated to saving lives, protecting rights, and building a better future for people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. The agency was created to help the millions who fled the Second World War and leads international action to protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, ensuring that everyone has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge from violence, persecution, or war at home.

With UNHCR I have visited refugees and those impacted by war and violence in Lebanon, Guatemala, Jordan, Poland, and Ukraine. I visited Lebanon just before the eighth anniversary of the Syrian conflict and met refugee families struggling to survive, among the millions living on the razor’s edge. I went to Kyiv after the full-scale Russian invasion and talked to people whose lives have been upended by this senseless war. I’ve advocated for refugees at the UN and in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, imploring the U.S. government not to look away from this global humanitarian crisis. I say this not to toot my own horn, but to explain that for me, if I am to speak out about these issues in these places, I can’t ignore the crisis that is front and center in the world right now.

I am Jewish. I’m also half Irish. My father’s mother came to the United States as a refugee from Poland. His father’s grandfather came from Ukraine, where over 100,000 Jewish people lost their lives in the ethnic pogroms that preceded the great horror of the Holocaust by just two decades. My mother’s grandparents came from Ireland seeking a better life. They arrived in New York with a surplus of hope and not much else.

My dad served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II. He met my mom and they got married–he was Jewish, she was Catholic. At the time that was an issue. They dealt with judgment from both sides of their families and the outside world. They turned that tension into humor and based their stand-up comedy act on their ethnic differences, which brought them together – and brought them success.

My mom converted to Judaism when they married. Ours was not a religious household, but we learned the traditions of inclusion and tolerance. After my Bar Mitzvah, I didn’t really go back to synagogue too often. But I always felt connected to my heritage, both Irish and Jewish, and valued the bonds I saw formed by both sides of my family. Eventually they came together through my parents’ love for each other. It was a palpable and beautiful thing I experienced as a child. As a kid growing up surrounded by that love, in New York City in the ‘70s, I never really experienced antisemitism. Where we find ourselves now is a place I never thought I would be.

Like so many Jews I grieve for those who suffered in the barbaric Hamas attack on October 7 and for those who have suffered as a result of those atrocities . My heart aches for the families who lost loved ones to this heinous act of terrorism and for those anxiously waiting these long months for the return of the hostages still in captivity. It’s a nightmare. I also grieve for the innocent people in Gaza who have lost their lives in this conflict and those suffering through that awful reality now.

I detest war, but what Hamas did was unconscionable and reprehensible. The hostages have to be freed. Terrorism must be named and fought by all people of conscience on the planet. There is no excuse for it under any circumstances.  

I stand with the Israeli people and their right to live in peace and safety. At the same time, I don’t agree with all of the Israeli government’s choices on how they are conducting the war. I want the violence to end, and the innocent Palestinian people affected by the humanitarian crisis that has resulted to receive the lifesaving aid they need. And I know that many in Israel share this sentiment.

I believe, as many people in Israel and around the world do, in the need for a two-state solution, one that ensures that the Israeli people can live in peace and safety alongside a homeland for the Palestinian people that provides them the same benefits.

I also see a troubling conflation in criticism of the actions of the Israeli government with denunciations of all Israelis and Jewish people. And as a result, we are seeing an undeniable rise in global antisemitism. I am seeing it myself, on the streets of the city I grew up in. It isn’t right and must be denounced.

Antisemitism must be condemned whenever it happens and wherever it exists. As should Islamophobia and bigotry of all kinds. There is a frightening amnesia for history in the air. We must remind ourselves that we can only manifest a more hopeful, just, and peaceful future by learning from the past.

Obviously I am no politician or diplomat. I have no solutions for these world conflicts and claim to offer none. I think I, like so many people, am struggling with how to process this all. But as an advocate for displaced people, I do believe this war must end. As I write this, there are about 120 million people all over the world who have been displaced by conflicts. In the Middle East, in Ukraine, Sudan, and many other countries. They all deserve to live in safety and peace. The human suffering must end. We must demand this of our leaders. Peace is the only path.

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• World Politics

The Biden administration needs to update its old thinking on Israel-Palestine

A viral essay by Biden’s foreign policy adviser shows why the US needs to rethink its strategy when it comes to Israel and Gaza.

by Jonathan Guyer

On September 29, at a festival put on by the Atlantic, Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan boasted of the Middle East’s unprecedented stability . Just a week later, Hamas attacked Israel , and far from being stable, the Middle East hasn’t been this volatile in years.

It’s not quite fair to hold someone to a turn of phrase on a conference panel, but it turns out that Sullivan wasn’t speaking off the cuff. That sentiment encapsulated how the Biden administration ’s key thinker sees the state of the world — or, at least, how he saw it. The sentiment also appears in the print version of Sullivan’s November/December cover story for Foreign Affair s magazine.

Overtaken by events would be a generous way to put this.

“The Middle East is quieter than it has been for decades,” he wrote in an essay that went to print before Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. Sullivan deleted that passage from the web edition of the article and updated the Middle East portions of the piece. “We are working closely with regional partners to facilitate the sustainable delivery of humanitarian assistance to civilians in the Gaza Strip,” Sullivan writes in the online version. “We are alert to the risk that the current crisis could spiral into a regional conflict.”

Israel and Hamas are at war. How did we get here? Vox offers clarity.

• Why did Hamas attack Israel?
• A timeline of Israel and Palestine’s complicated history
• What does the US-Israel relationship mean for the war?
• Occupation, annexation, and other terms you should know
• All of the times Israel and Palestine tried to make peace

But the print edition of the magazine arrived on doorsteps this week and is now a striking artifact of Biden’s pre-October 7 priorities. And while it would be easy to dunk on some of the now out-of-date passages from Sullivan, which demonstrated how the Biden administration totally missed the possibility of a new Hamas-Israel war, what’s more interesting is how little these events have seemed to change things for the administration.

A read of the web version of his piece shows that the Hamas-Israel war has not fundamentally altered the national security adviser’s assumptions about the world. He remains focused on using unconventional economic tools, like investing in the US industrial base and using export controls to advance US statecraft, and stitching together new alliances to benefit American interests, all while being disciplined about how the US uses its military power. “Americans should be optimistic about the future,” he writes in both versions. “Old assumptions and structures must be adapted to meet the challenges the United States will face between now and 2050.” But what’s noteworthy is that the United States’ approach to the Middle East and Israel, according to Sullivan, is still not one of those areas that needs an update.

Yet the Hamas-Israel war reveals both the limits of Biden’s current foreign policy and the need for new thinking. Even as the administration has prioritized countering China and Russia , the Middle East has pulled the White House back in. For Sullivan, the Biden administration’s approach “frees up resources for other global priorities, reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflicts, and ensures that U.S. interests are protected on a far more sustainable basis.” But the US has sent two aircraft carrier groups to the Middle East, militants are attacking US military bases in Iraq and Syria, and a severe humanitarian crisis is spiraling in Gaza, all as the potential for a larger regional war looms. The unconventional diplomatic tools Sullivan touts in other contexts don’t always apply well to Israel: The country’s economic partnerships with Arab states, for example, are not coming in handy.

Biden paid a political price for the Afghanistan withdrawal, and Sullivan stands by the decision to “avoid protracted forever wars ... that do little to actually reduce the threats to the U.S.” But that instinct doesn’t seem sufficiently present here. The administration backs Israel in a war that — for all the US’s pushing for Israel to define its goals — has no clear outcome and that will wear away US credibility in the world. The administration has shown an old instinct to call for a two-state solution without an investment in policies that would lead there.

The last three weeks have shown that the assumption that the Middle East is stable is simply wrong — no one could deny that. But what policymakers should realize is that the old Middle East toolkit of managing conflicts without addressing their root causes does not apply. And on that measure, at least, the Biden administration is not ready to offer a correction.

What Jake Sullivan’s essay says

Sullivan in the essay focuses on the Biden administration’s big themes: countering China (and to a lesser extent Russia), prioritizing industrial policy, reinvigorating alliances and multilateral partnerships, and tackling global development issues like health and the environment, with signposts on how the US will prioritize these and other competing challenges.

“By investing in the sources of domestic strength, deepening alliances and partnerships, delivering results on global challenges, and staying disciplined in the exercise of power, the United States will be prepared to advance its vision of a free, open, prosperous, and secure world no matter what surprises are in store,” Sullivan writes. “We have created, in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s words, ‘situations of strength.’”

What makes the essay noteworthy is not just the content, but the author. The national security adviser has gotten more powerful in each subsequent presidency, and Sullivan is the zenith of that trend. He’s considered the architect of the administration’s foreign policy, as profile after profile has portrayed him.

It’s also rare for a sitting national security adviser to write at such length for readers. And it’s different from a speech, which Sullivan has delivered at many a think tank and which often serves as an announcement of a new policy; it’s also less technical or in-depth than an academic publication or a policy memo. You might call it a vibes piece, not with actionable foreign policy advice but rather an ideological blueprint for the Biden administration’s worldview.

The main focus is on economic statecraft and alliance-building aimed at pushing back against China, with the Middle East component coming much later on in the article.

What’s interesting is that a war between Israel and Hamas doesn’t alter Jake Sullivan’s fundamental reasoning: The Middle East still falls under the heading of “Pick Your Battles.” That doesn’t seem feasible, nor does it seem to reflect what the administration has done since October 7. The last three weeks have drawn the US in, given Washington’s longtime role as Israel’s security guarantor.

The administration’s Middle East approach “emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors,” Sullivan wrote in the original version of the essay. “And it is bearing fruit,” bringing up the example of a “new economic corridor” announced in September that would ultimately connect India to Europe, through the Middle East. The web update changed “bearing fruit” to, “There was material progress,” and cited the relative calm in Yemen’s war. The rest of the text stayed the same.

A lot of lines were cut, like “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza,” referencing the May 2021 conflict there, and “restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.” (Israel and the PLO held talks in March, which didn’t go anywhere, and this month the two parties are not talking.)

Biden’s team has only put limited attention to Israel-Palestine in the past two and a half years. When Israel and Hamas fought in May 2021, Sullivan worked with regional partners to negotiate a ceasefire in 10 days. That event does not majorly figure into how the administration sees the Middle East. It seems to have confirmed priors, reinforcing the now-shattered idea that the conflict is manageable.

• This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere

Palestine has not been a central component of Middle East policy. President Donald Trump shunted aside Palestinians in favor of Israel-Arab normalization deals, and the Biden administration has continued that policy. In July 2022, the White House released a fact sheet on the “ United States-Palestinian Relationship ” that focused on economic initiatives without a larger strategy for addressing the root causes of the conflict. As a senior administration official told journalists that month, “[W]e are not going to come in with a top-down peace plan, because we don’t believe that that would be the best approach and it would set expectations that would probably fall flat.” Ever since, the administration sought a deal that would normalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia .

Sullivan does not mention the path toward a Palestinian state in the original essay, but instead emphasizes “integrating the region” through normalization. It’s why the obscure I2U2 partnership (between India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the US) merits a mention, an example that shows how the administration was continuing the Trump policy of pursuing a stability in the region that overlooked Palestinians. That approach has now proved to be unsustainable and even incendiary. And those policies will be increasingly difficult as the Israeli military campaign continues.

The essay has now been updated to say, “We are committed to a two-state solution. In fact, our discussions with Saudi Arabia and Israel toward normalization have always included significant proposals for the Palestinians. If agreed, this component would ensure that a path to two states remains viable, with significant and concrete steps taken in that direction by all relevant parties.”

But there are not strong indications that US leadership can secure an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. It hasn’t been a priority in the past two and a half years, nor is it now a priority for the near or even medium term.

Above all else, and beyond the behind-the-scenes efforts Biden has undertaken to slow a ground invasion of Gaza, the administration stands with Israel. Biden is asking Congress for $14 billion of military aid to the country. US officials have reportedly helped delay a ground incursion into Gaza and marshaled a small supply of humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza. But the Biden administration has not called for a Mideast ceasefire and vetoed a United Nations resolution with softened language on this.

But the situation is so dire — the Israeli military campaign continues — that it’s surprising that the Biden administration sees its policies as durable and its framework as working.

The Biden administration’s Middle East mantra, as both versions of the essay conclude, is, “We have to advance regional integration in the Middle East while continuing to check Iran .” That is, Biden is doubling down on Israel normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia without acknowledging how much has changed in the world. The Hamas-Israel war led the Saudi crown prince and the Iranian president to talk on the phone for the first time since they began a China-led rapprochement . We haven’t yet seen such a course correction from Biden.

The Biden administration is still focused on countering China

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Jake Sullivan was leading White House efforts to write the National Security Strategy. That document guides US policy broadly, and officials delayed publication and rewrote it to stress the threat of Russia alongside the marquee issue of China.

The Biden administration remains focused on that superpower conflict. “The crisis in the Middle East does not change the fact that the United States needs to prepare for a new era of strategic competition—in particular by deterring and responding to great-power aggression,” writes Sullivan in the article. He also discusses China with measured language that reflects the administration’s attempts to break with the Trump administration’s heated China rhetoric while still maintaining some of its hawkish approaches.

Ali Wyne, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, agrees that the Middle East war does not fundamentally affect what the US should focus on today. “Instability in the Middle East and Europe does not invalidate the judgment that the Indo-Pacific’s economic and military centrality in world affairs is poised to grow apace,” he wrote in an email.

The trickier part from a policy perspective is the role of the US military in the world. Sullivan acknowledges that “Washington could no longer afford an undisciplined approach to the use of military force.” Sullivan says the administration seeks to dodge the trap of “protracted forever wars that can tie down US forces and that do little to actually reduce the threats to the United States,” and cites the withdrawal from Afghanistan . But explaining this, Sullivan doesn’t engage with the relatively small but seemingly permanent US troop presence in places like Iraq and Syria , among others. Those US servicemembers are coming under more and more militant attacks and could draw the US even further into Middle East war.

Sullivan argues in the essay that the US has entered a whole new era and that means that the United States has to make significant adjustments. “And yet, much of his prescription looks a lot like inertia,” Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told me. “None of this is really argued in a way that would give a reader confidence that the US government has a plan to keep costs and risks under control.”

While Sullivan acknowledges in his writing that America’s resources are limited and difficult choices will need to be made, he does not address the trade-offs or how to think about them. A US aircraft carrier — like the two Biden deployed to the waters near Israel in the weeks after Hamas’s attack, out of 11 — can only be in one place at once.

The potential of a long-term entanglement in a new Middle East war imperils Biden’s priorities. It could take not just manpower, but resources and attention away from countering China — which is “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge,” according to the National Security Strategy. Yet the Biden administration acknowledges, “As we implement this strategy, we will continually assess and reassess our approach to ensure we are best serving the American people.” Now is one of those moments to assess whether this is all working.

A wholesale reassessment of the US relationship with Israel, its closest Middle East ally and a stalwart defense partner, would be unlikely. Hamas is holding Americans and dual citizens hostage, and a wider war would hurt the US’s Middle East partners. The US sees the partnership with Israel based on shared values and cultural connections. American support of Israel is an unquestioned tenet of bipartisan foreign policy.

But that partnership carries risks, too — and not just ones related to this outbreak of violence. “Much of the world sees the United States actively assisting the government of Israel in dispossessing and occupying Palestinian land,” Wertheim told me. Sullivan doesn’t grapple with what that means for US prestige and power in the world that many observers see the US as complicit if not a participant in Israel’s Gaza war, even as the Israeli goals remain undefined.

The essay from Sullivan contrasts that of his former Obama administration colleague Ben Rhodes. Writing in the New York Review of Books , Rhodes cautions that if Israel further escalates its military campaign in Gaza, it risks “igniting a war of undetermined length, cost, and consequences.” Rhodes says there is a need for “genuinely pursuing an Israeli–Palestinian peace as the end of this war.”

That would require intensive US leadership.

The cover of the issue is a frayed and fragmented American flag above Sullivan’s name and the headline “The Sources of American Power.” Previously, that image may have signaled the coming together of the US after the cleavages of the Trump years and the toll it took on American influence in the world. Now, the flag suggests the US is coming apart, unable to calm a Middle East at war and facing internal cracks as it grapples with the threats of Russia and China.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Israel’s war on Gaza updates: 12 killed in Israeli strike on Gaza school

Israeli attack killed 12 Palestinians in a strike on Mustafa Hafez School in Gaza City, where hundreds of displaced people are sheltering.

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Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Key Issues at Stake Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be justly mentioned among the most long-lasting and heated ones in the history of humanity. Its modern history is considered to begin in the early twentieth century; however, the conflict between Muslims and Judeans inhabiting the area counts for more than a few thousands of years. Among it’s the most difficult issues are territorial claims including mutual recognition, Israeli settlements, Palestinian freedom of movement, security, borders, water rights, refugee legalities and the eternal struggle for the control in the city of Jerusalem (Frisch 2004).

The issues related to economy, security, territorial claims and religious matters including Islam and Judaism are going to be discussed on the basis of historical, juridical and sociological arguments in the following paper. Generally, it appears that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mainly resulted by international, economical and governmental issues along with territorial claims which if unsolved will let it to continue for unlimited period in the future with the sad outcomes similar to those existing nowadays including terrorism, incessant military actions and the other ways shattering hopes for peace in the “Promised land”.

First of all, discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it should be mentioned that one of the most significant issues as well as one of the most critical reasons behind this conflict is historically caused by the issues related to territorial matters such as mutual recognition, Israeli settlements, Palestinian freedom of movement, security, borders, water rights, refugee legalities and the eternal struggle for the control in the city of Jerusalem. Thus, it appears that the problem exists on a state level, first of all. In his article, Frisch develops the argument proving the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mainly caused by nationalist matters and, therefore, occurs on the second level of analysis (2004).

Reveling the history of the conflict, the article provides sufficient examples supporting the argument of this conflict being due to nationalist supremacy, but also condones that the theocratic concepts for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be found concealed in the fight for national sovereignty. “Extremist Palestinian elements, such as Hamas, are unwilling to recognize Israel’s very right to exist, and continue to violently act against Israel, against the moderate Palestinian leadership and against the peace process” (Israel, the Conflict and Peace: Answers to frequently asked questions 2007, par. 59). This big issue includes a row of minor ones. Among them is the one of Israel settlements such as those adjacent to and including Ariel. Territorial subcomponents of the conflict are so complicated that the world’s community interferes to this problem including Europe and the United States (Frisch 2007).Yet, as it often happens, the territorial issues are the most difficult ones to solve, and despite numerous efforts on the part of the representatives from the world society, are not solved by the present moment.

In addition, the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also connected to the position of Israel and its diplomatic and political strategies. Israel’s strategy in the conflict appears to be ambiguous. Many claim it as unwise and showing a measure of weakness on Israel’s part. According to Frisch, the country’s behavior shows “the severe asymmetry that exists between Israel’s small size, meager resources, and lack of strategic depth compared to the superiority of numbers, territory, and potential resources on the Arab side “ (2007, p.16). Such position may be caused by some concealed reasons as it often happened in the case of this nation. There exist opinions that in this way Israel is trying to dispose the support from the international community on its side (Frisch 2004). In addition, in the beginning of 2000s Israel showed the other drawback in its strategy in the conflict resorting to the use of significant military forces. “Israeli military strategy, as opposed to its political grand strategy, follows the well-known maxim that “if you want peace, prepare for war,” or even more specifically, that offense is the best form of defense” (Frisch 2004).

And yet, this strategy appeared to be more than unsuccessful. As a result, the cases of terroristic attacks became ever more frequent. Responding to Israel’s military attacks extremists started committing “suicide bombings, resulting in tit-for-tat or loop-like and repetitive violence and counter-violence without meaningful, let alone decisive results for the stronger side” (Frisch 2005, p. 45). The connection between Israel’s military actions and Palestinian suicide bombings is evident from a row of experiences including the al-Ibrahimi Mosque’s massacre in Hebron in 1994 and a row of terroristic acts committed in the beginning of 1996 by the Islamists as a response to opening of the tunnel next to the Temple Mount (Frisch 2004). Thus, military and terroristic actions by Arabs are motivated by an unsuccessful strategy chosen by Israel. On the contrary, when Israel changed its aggressive military strategy to the more peaceful one under the pressure of the world’s society and the United States, in particular, Arabs appeared to be calmed down. This can be observed in 2003 in an exceptional way. According to Frisch, “in September 2003, Arafat bowed to international pressure and agreed to create the new position of prime minister for Mahmoud Abbas, who had been both a serious opponent of a violent uprising and an ardent dove” (2007, 13). Thus, a wise strategy motivated by peace observation is important in order to progress in the solving of the conflict.

Secondly, territorial issues are inseparably connected with the issues of security. Being motivated by their nationalistic ideas and radical Islamic beliefs, Muslims formed a row of terroristic organizations including Hamas and Fatah which are responsible for innumerable terroristic acts constantly taking away the lives of hundreds of people. According to official data, in March 2002 alone, 135 Jewish civilians were killed; in the closing days of the month thirty people attending a Seder night ceremony in Netanya hotel were killed by a suicide bomber (Frisch 2004). In addition, “from 2003 to 2004 mortars and qassam rockets increased by fifty percent, mortars by twenty, with declines registered for other types of violence” (Frisch 2007, p. 14). These are just a few facts related to the safety issues mentioned here. Looking at the evidences concerning the means of violence employed by the Palestinians in the sector of Gaza along with the West bank territories and the rest of the region’s area, a conclusion can be made that the issues of security raised in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are by far the most severe ones both on the local and global scales.

Thirdly, the issues related to economy are also to be taken into consideration in connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Especially, Israel can be mentioned as the one suffering great losses on the reason of a variety of problems caused by the conflict. According to Frisch, “the Israeli economy rebounded only when Israel succeeded in stemming the rise of terrorism in 2003, soon followed by a spurt of growth of four percent in absolute terms, and three percent on a per capita basis in 2004” (2007, p. 11).Of course, the Palestine autonomy is also affected. Economical condition in the sectors belonging to the Palestine autonomy is much more complicated than in Israel. The population there suffers of unemployment, and low levels of official financial support to the needy ones (Frisch 2005).

And finally, religious matters are related to the nationalistic ideas of Palestinians. Starting from the year 1980, when Fatah extremists killed five yeshiva students in Hebron, the homogeneous religious character in the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation became evident. Still the connection between religious and nationalistic issues is very close. For example, in 1994 29 Muslim worshipers were killed by a Jewish in the Cave of the Patriarchs which is a holy place for both religions (Frisch 2004). Thus, religious matters are also used by the Palestinian nationalists as a cover-up for their deeds. Furthermore, the other serious felonies on an individual level of analysis are related to the strategy of the negotiations between the countries which are the parties of the conflict. The moral principles lying behind the problem are one of the main issues which require deep understanding along with professional approach form diplomatists in order to achieve progress in the pursuit for peace in this region. Unless, the leaders of both adversary parties would come to a compromise in religious and territorial issues, the conflict cannot be solved.

Reasoning on the problem form on the international level, it should be stated that it is connected to an abundance of the most serious issues mainly related to the confrontation between Muslim and Non-Muslim world which are, first of all, nationalistic issues between the Israeli people and Palestinian people. Massive Palestinian terrorism has presented one of the most severely stated issues which are rife in connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Frisch 2007). This conflict developed a precedent for Muslim extremists to follow. In order to evade the sad consequences of such outcomes, a wise peace strategy on the international level is to be developed and implemented. In this vein, during the history of the conflict international representatives were actively participating in resolving the issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and many more. A successful period in the peace negotiations has occurred when Arabian party of the conflict spoke the language of peace and demonstrated willingness to perform particular actions in order to develop comfortable conditions for mutual coexistence in the problematic territory. Such Arab leaders as the president of Egypt Sadat and Jordanian King Hussein made their significant contribution into resolving a row of complicated issues.

Reflecting on the issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict including religious, territorial, economical and security ones, it is important to mention that they are too complicated to try to solve them in an aggressive way. The whole course of the conflict’s history has demonstrated the success of peaceful strategies along with the breakdown of aggressive actions. Thus, active, well-developed and respectful measures are to be developed in the individual, state and international level in order to overcome the problem; and as the problem mainly occurs on the state level it should be, first of all, approached from this perspective.

Frisch, H. & Sandler, S. (2004). Religion, State, and the International System in the Israeli– Palestinian Conflict. International Political Science Review , 25(1) , 77-96.

Frisch, H. (2005). Has the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Become Islamic? Fatah, Islam, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades. United States: Taylor & Frances Inc.

Frisch, H. (2007). (The) Fence or Offense? Testing the Effectiveness of “The Fence” in Judea and Samaria. Democracy and Security, 3(1), 1-19.

Israel, the Conflict and Peace: Answers to frequently asked questions. (2007). Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, January 23). Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Key Issues at Stake. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Key Issues at Stake." January 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/.

1. IvyPanda . "Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Key Issues at Stake." January 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/.

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Israel-Hamas Conflict and its Global Impact

• 31 Oct 2023
• GS Paper - 2
• Effect of Policies & Politics of Countries on India's Interests

For Prelims: Israel-Hamas conflict , Gaza Strip , Strait of Hormuz

For Mains : Impact of Israel-Palestine Conflict on India and International geopolitical scenario, Global Trade War, Oil Prices Manipulation.

Why in News?

The ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict has escalated due to Israel's ground offensive in the Gaza Strip , to eliminate Hamas. This has raised concerns about the post-conflict phase and its potential impact on the global economy.

• Bloomberg, a global media company has outlined three scenarios for the conflict and how each could affect countries around the world.

What are the Three Possible Scenarios for the Conflict and their Potential Effects?

• In this scenario, the conflict remains primarily localized in the Gaza Strip , with limited expansion into other regions.
• Limited direct impact on the global economy. Nevertheless, this is unwelcome news for a world economy recovering from various setbacks, as central banks struggle between addressing inflation and preventing economic slowdowns.
• The conflict can result in an increasing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, marked by significant casualties, with the death toll already surpassing 8,000.
• This scenario involves a broader regional conflict, with the potential involvement of Iran-backed militant groups in Lebanon and Syria , as well as the Houthis in Yemen.
• This could lead to escalation of violence in multiple regional locations, leading to increased instability and conflict..
• Oil prices could rise to around the mid-USD 90s, higher than the current USD 90 per barrel,
• Higher inflation rates globally, potentially denting global economic growth by 0.3% points.
• The most extreme scenario envisions a full-scale war between regional powers Israel and Iran, with the possible involvement of major world powers such as the United States, China, and Russia.
• Over 20% of the world's crude supply comes from West Asia, conflict in the region may drastically push up the Crude oil prices up to USD 150 per barrel.
• Even with potential capacity from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, if they do not align with Iran, oil shipments may still face challenges in passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a 48-kilometer shipping chokepoint through which nearly one-fifth of the world's total oil production transits.
• Global inflation could rise to about 6.7% in 2024, potentially causing global economic growth to slow by almost 2% points and leading to a possible worldwide recession with significant implications for countries like India and the US.
• Hamas is a Palestinian political armed group that was founded in 1987. It's a militant group that emerged as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation.
• It gained popularity as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation and Fatah.
• The United States has designated Hamas a terror organization since 1997. Many other countries, including Israel and most of Europe, see it the same way.
• Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded.
• Hamas rejects any alternative to the complete liberation of Palestine.

UPSC Civil Services Examination, Previous Year Question (PYQ)

Q1. Mediterranean Sea is a border of which of the following countries? (2017)

Select the correct answer using the code given below:

(a) 1, 2 and 3 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 3 and 4 only (d) 1, 3 and 4 only

Q2. Which one of the following countries of South-West Asia does not open out to the Mediterranean Sea? (2015)

(a) Syria (b) Jordan (c) Lebanon (d) Israel

Q3. The term “two-state solution” is sometimes mentioned in the news in the context of the affairs of (2018)

(a) China (b) Israel (c) Iraq (d) Yemen

Q. “India’s relations with Israel have, of late, acquired a depth and diversity, which cannot be rolled back.” Discuss. (2018)

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Karl Marx’s Jewish blind spot

How the thinker missed the dangers of nationalism..

Published : Aug 17, 2024 19:39 IST - 7 MINS READ

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The Karl Marx monument in Chemnitz, Germany. | Photo Credit: MAREK SLUSARCZYK/iStock

Karl Marx’s famous essay “On the Jewish Question”, written in 1843 and published a year later, needs to be reread in the light of Zionist and other cultural forms of nationalism in vogue today. The concerns in Marx’s essay can be divided into two parts: one, the question vis-à-vis the specific Christian-Jew conflict in Germany via the historian and theologian Bruno Bauer’s prescription for Jews; two, the critique of Jewishness (and of all collective identities or communities of faith) in relation to the general theory of modernity.

Bauer reminded Jews to learn to be German first and an everyman next, and forget being a Jew. His argument was that to ask for recognition from the Christian state of Germany was to legitimise it, hence Jews must bypass that question and demand everyone’s liberation from a religious state. There was no point, Bauer argued, to demand the end of Christian prejudice without ending Jewish prejudice. But he did not realise that he was dismissing the minoritarian significance of the Jewish question in favour of the nationalist—as if a community’s subjective views regarding others are significant enough to determine its political status. Even though the Christian state is critiqued in favour of the secular, by dismissing the concerns of the minority, Bauer’s was a majoritarian understanding of the problem. In his universalist logic, Jews must give up their minority status if they want to be emancipated.

Marx explores Bauer’s critique of the Jewish desire for political emancipation. He is in agreement with Bauer on the larger framework of a secularised national identity but differs on the question of citizenship. For Marx, citizenship is a liberal-bourgeois concept which individuates people by merely privatising belief, ego, self-interest, and the desire and accumulation of property and capital. To treat emancipation at the level of civil society alone is thus not enough; it restricts its revolutionary potential. All rights of citizens from labour to law are constricted by the emphasis on civil society alone, and produce what Marx calls the “abstract, artificial man, man as an  allegorical, juridical  person”.

Marx is unhappy that religion remains the “secret” of the individual citizen, as Judaism exists alongside the citizen in a secularised form. The argument for the destruction of any community of faith is based on a rational and universal idea of human emancipation. It forgets the majoritarian potential of nationalism where the minorities are under threat. Fascist thinking is not the opposite of Marxism in this regard, but its double.

Marx’s anti-culturalism

National Socialism condemned Jews in the name of those essentialised attributes that Bauer and Marx, too, laid down as a sickness that had to be overcome. Marx’s anti-culturalism identifies negative attributes of character (such as ego and self-interest) to traditional identities alone. A national community as a form of collective self-interest that can pose a majoritarian danger for “others” was not considered. Even though the ideological motivations are different, fascists use and exploit the language of cultural essentialism against minorities. In his blindness, Marx blessed the majoritarian project and put the minority community in danger. His radical prescription to make being Jew impossible is dangerously close to Nazi logic that the Jew must be eliminated because he cannot be integrated. The fascist and communist idea of the nation has one fundamental connection: no one can exist as other within it, without being an enemy.

Also Read | The Nazification of Israel

The duality in the citizen-cum-person-of-faith that Marx decried as the privatising of religion in bourgeois civil society is the best option for people to grapple with the terrors of the new beast called the modern nation-state, and the alienation of individuated life. This allegorical existence allows a desirable middle ground to civil society, caught between the oppressive state and the community. It acts as a safety valve in spiritual and psychological terms for people faced with the demands of a modern Moloch.

What Marx calls a “secret” is the Jewish soul that faced Hitler’s concentration camps and the dissident soul that faced Josef Stalin’s Gulags. Stalin believed in “the engineers of the human soul” who treated society like a factory that produced subservient bodies. In contrast, Gandhi said, explaining Satyagraha in Young India in 1931, that “the tyrant, whom the satyagrahi seeks to resist, has power over his body and material possessions, but he can have no power over his soul.” The ungraspable, hence bottomless soul preserves the innermost spirit of resistance.

In modernity, the community has been paradoxically broken and widened to embrace the nation. Hegel’s misplaced enthusiasm for the nation beast ruined the edifice of modern thought. There was a scientific bravura to produce a new society. The figure called “man” was born out of a rationalist fantasy that turned against itself. As if people under the liberal state are half-angels, awaiting transformation into full-fledged angels under a communist regime.

“The Jews must decide if their being the chosen people must include violence in the name of Israel, people chosen for endless violence to establish a dystopian promise of Israel.”

Milan Kundera wrote about such angels in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). Kundera described them as sincere citizens of a totalitarian regime who indulged in “circle dancing”: a giant dance of forgetting (“absolute injustice and absolute solace at the same time” as Kundera explained in The Art of the Novel ) where political crimes were collectively ignored and endorsed at the same time. No one wanted to fall out of this ring, for “once a circle closes, there is no return”.

The nihilist characters of Dostoevsky’s Demons (1873) are considered precursory analogues to people who appeared later in the stage of history. Stavrogin is a man who lost the distinction between good and evil, and for Shigalyev, the possibility of freedom can only come from limitless dictatorship. Such thinking has produced far-left and far-right ideologues in the twentieth century. They define and limit the nature of Marx’s optimism.

The Rabbis and orthodox Jews who have decried Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians are those who have not sold their brains and soul to the Zionist project. They know the difference between an ethical community and the unscrupulous ways of a settler-community. Surely, the Jews must decide if their being the chosen people must include violence in the name of Israel, people chosen for endless violence to establish a dystopian promise of Israel.

‘Struggle between two memories’

The evil of German nationalism forced the Jews to leave their homeland in Europe and seek refuge in Israel. The nature of confrontation with Muslims who inhabited that place was overridden by the lens of a brutalised and desperate people. In 1973, when he was living in Beirut, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s Arab generosity put the Israeli-Palestinian encounter as “a struggle between two memories.” The community of memories evoked by Darwish falls outside the discourse of the state. That is why the Palestine-Israel encounter was bound to be catastrophic.

Gandhi wrote in the Harijan in 1938: “This cry for the national home affords a colourable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews. But the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history.” Despite acknowledging its exceptional status, Gandhi hesitated to justify a nation based on the tragic irony of history where persecution moved hands. His reasons were historical and political, rather than showing a lack of empathy: “The Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract. It is in their hearts. But if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun.” Gandhi dared to give his understanding of Judeo-Christian ethics back to the Jews: You cannot claim a nation by committing foundational violence against people who lived there.

Also Read | Do Palestinians have the right to resist? The unequivocal answer is yes

The Enlightenment provided the world with a new ethic of the secular self, but it experienced severe strain under modern regimes of power. The secular self is cushioned by the idea of a national community founded on a ruthless idea of sovereignty. It transforms the idea of neighbourhood into territorial paranoia.

In 1918, Tagore described modern power as the “scientific product made in the political laboratory of the Nation, through the dissolution of personal humanity.” Unparalleled in his time, Tagore’s indictment of the nation negates the optimism of Enlightenment thought. In Tagore’s visionary understanding, the humanist project that replaced the community with the utopian idea of the “new man” was nothing more than a soulless laboratory product of history. It is time the misplaced arrogance of modern political thought dialogues with older forms of being human.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.

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Israel-Hamas war latest: Israeli strikes kill at least 17 in Gaza overnight, Palestinians say

Palestinian health officials say Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday killed at least 17 people, including five children and their parents

Palestinian health officials say Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Wednesday killed at least 17 people, including five children and their parents.

The latest strikes came on the eve of new talks aimed at reaching a cease-fire in the 10-month-long war. The United States, Qatar and Egypt are hoping to broker an agreement, but the sides remain far apart on several issues even after months of indirect negotiations.

One strike hit a family home late Tuesday in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, which dates back to the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation . It killed five children, ranging in age from 2 to 11, and their parents, according to the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

An Associated Press reporter who saw the bodies arrive said they had been dismembered by the blast and that the 2-year-old had been decapitated.

In the nearby Maghazi refugee camp, a strike on a home early Wednesday killed four people and wounded others, the hospital said.

In the southern city of Khan Younis, the Health Ministry’s emergency service said first responders recovered the bodies of four men who were killed in a strike on a residential tower late Tuesday.

Two more people were killed in an Israeli strike on a house in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, according to the emergency service. The strike also wounded five people.

Health authorities in Gaza do not say whether those killed in Israeli strikes are militants or civilians. Israel says it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in residential areas. The army rarely comments on individual strikes.

Here’s the latest:

BEIRUT — A senior adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said it was critical to take advantage of “this window for diplomatic action” to end the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip and ongoing hostilities in Lebanon, fearing that ongoing escalations could “spiral out of control.”

Amos Hochstein, who has been tasked with monthslong shuttle diplomacy between Lebanon and Israel, spoke at a news conference after meeting Lebanese Speaker Nabih Berri, as the Mideast anxiously anticipates retaliatory attacks on Israel from Iran and the powerful Lebanese Hezbollah group.

“The more time goes by of escalated tensions the more time goes by of daily conflict the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that goes out of control,” Hochstein said in Beirut.

Cease-fire talks are supposed to resume in Doha on Thursday between Hamas and Israel through Qatari, Egyptian and American mediators.

Hochstein said he and Berri agreed there are “no more valid excuses from any party for any further delay” on a cease-fire based on a framework presented by Biden months ago.

“The deal would also help enable a diplomatic resolution here in Lebanon,” the U.S. envoy added.

Hezbollah and Israel have traded strikes since Oct. 8, a day after the Palestinian Hamas group’s surprise attack into southern Israel sparked the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in the besieged Gaza Strip. Hezbollah says it will stop its attacks on northern Israel once there is a cease-fire in Gaza.

However, the initial exchanges along the battered border towns of Lebanon and Israel have since expanded and intensified.

Last month, a rare Israeli airstrike in southern Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top commander who Israel accused of firing a rocket into Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 youths. Hours later, an explosion in Iran killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh that Tehran blamed on Israel.

Over the past two weeks, the region has been on a knife-edge, as diplomatic efforts continue to prevent the monthslong regional tensions from spiraling into all-out war. Iran and Hezbollah say they are committed to their retaliatory attack.

Hochstein’s visit to Lebanon comes after he met with Israeli officials on Tuesday. He is scheduled to meet with caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Lebanon’s army chief.

JERUSALEM — Residents of a beleaguered Bedouin hamlet in the southern reaches of the occupied West Bank say Israeli military bulldozers demolished six more homes in the community on Wednesday, leaving 28 people homeless.

The demolitions in Umm Al-Khair come after military bulldozers last month knocked down several homes in the village , leaving a quarter of the village’s 200 people without shelter.

Videos sent by residents of the village to The Associated Press showed bulldozers rolling into the community on Wednesday morning, escorted by at least one military vehicle. Soldiers could be seen pushing protesters and Palestinians away from the demolition zone, and bulldozers crashed into small tent-like structures, knocking them to the ground.

COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of civilian matters in the West Bank, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the past, it has alleged that many of the structures in the village were built without permits. Palestinians in these areas have long said it is virtually impossible to get construction permits from Israeli authorities.

Umm Al-Khair has also been the subject of ramped-up settler attacks over the last few months, attacks which residents say have harmed the village water supply and gone unpunished by military authorities. Small Bedouin hamlets in the West Bank are some of the most vulnerable communities to displacement caused by demolitions and settler violence, rights groups say.

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