Let me start with something that should be patently obvious October 7, 2023 was wrong. What Hamas did was wrong.

Evil visited the Nova festival and the settlements (for the purpose of this article I am NOT discussing the placing of settlements because my point is moral, but I do accept that this is part of the wider discussion).  Even when some of the worst of claimed Hamas' atrocities have been debunked they still leave an impression on our minds; the most obvious one being the cooking of a live baby in an oven / microwave. However, naturally following on what the Palestinian people haven endured since does not become right just because October 7 happened.

Palestinian lives are not collateral punctuation at the end of someone else’s tragedy.

As the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) carried out their retaliatory actions people were killed, injured, traumatised and displaced as their homes and livelihoods were also destroyed. Each of those lives matter, they are human lives and no one life is more important than another nor is any single life valueless.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not antisemitic, in fact quite the contrary. I kind of understand the passive aggressive position that the Israeli state has adopted. While some of the Arab nations around them have made a peace and come to some kind of understanding, many still hate them.

I remember encountering this when speaking some Turkish students who I met on Erasmus. Oppressed, displaced and murdered for the last two millennia simply because they are Jews, the Final Solution was the final straw, especially when you realise that a significant part of the killing process was carried out by the Jews themselves who led themselves as lambs led to the slaughter.

Let's look at an example (not totally encompassing, but it will give you an idea even if it was not always the case). Please note I am not judging anybody here, because everything was doing what they did under duress and if they didn't do the Nazi's bidding they would be on the next transport to a death camp or get a bullet in the head.

Jewish leaders helped herd their fellow Jews into ghettos. Then the same leaders drew up the lists for deportation and the Jewish Police ensured that the deportations were enforced.

Upon arrival typically at Auschwitz (but not only) a Nazi doctor would make a life or death decision (less so at Treblinka - which was even more deadly in terms of percentages than Auschwitz) for each prisoner, unless there was no need for new workers in which case the transport went straight to the gas chambers. Birkenhau even lengthened the train line to facilitate this. 

On the train platform, special Jewish workers organised new prisoners into queues before selection and then escorted them to either the gas chambers or to the next stage in processing them.

Prisoners also collected the new prisoners belongings and moved them on to the Kanada sheds to be sorted. Meanwhile at the gas chambers Sonderkomando organised the prisoners as they went into the changing rooms and then the "showers". When the "shower" was full, a Nazi would drop the Zykon B in to the "shower room" and the gas would be released.

Half an hour or so later the same Sonderkomando would incinerate the victims either in crematoria or open pits - when the crematoria were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers after searching body cavities for anything of value and removing gold teeth from the victims.

So it can be seen that much of the process was carried out by the Jews themselves - although they had no real choice. Sometimes they fought back. The Jewish Uprising (not to be confused with the Home Army's Uprising a year later) in Warsaw, Sobibor and the riot and destruction of one of the gas chambers in Birkenhau are the most obvious examples.

But back to the story, as Older_Rah says.

To repeat myself, I do not hate Jewish people. I do not believe Jewish people are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government. And I do not have to hate Jewish people to look at what is happening in Gaza and say how wrong it is. October 7, 2023 was horrific. People were murdered. Families were destroyed. Children were killed. I can say that without hesitation. I can grieve those lives without qualification. What I cannot do is pretend Palestinian lives somehow became worth less on October 8. Israel reports 43 Israeli children under the age of 18 were killed in the Hamas-led attack on October 7.  

Forty-three children.

That is horrific but in the subsequent actions of the IDF 21,283 Palestinian children have been identified among the dead in Gaza.

Twenty-one thousand two hundred and eighty-three children.

I don’t even know how you say that number and then just keep talking. How do you hear that and immediately start explaining it?

But after what Hamas did on October 7, Israel has a right to defend itself, I hear some say.

Twenty-one thousand two hundred and eighty-three children.

They were not Hamas. They were children. Additionally, more than 10,000 women have been identified among the dead too. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been reported killed in Gaza altogether. Please do not confuse this more up to date figure with the one I quote later. Hamas is evil and what they did was wrong, but it doesn't justify what has followed. Non-combatants including women and children were murdered. Sometimes a whole block of flats is destroyed just to get one (suspected) member of Hamas

That is a definition of overkill.

Can someone please explain to me when condemning one atrocity started requiring us to excuse another one.

I can grieve both the Israeli people murdered on October 7 and those lost in Gaza. For goodness sake we are talking about humanity and this is showing it worst face. Israel has publicly claimed that tens of thousands of militants have been killed in Gaza. But in May 2025, a classified Israeli military intelligence database reportedly listed about 8,900 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters as dead or probably dead.

Let's break this down,

At that point (May 2025), about 53,000 Palestinians had been reported killed and 8,900 or about 17 percent of them were Hamas / Jihadists. Now, Israel disputes the reporting around those numbers. And that database was from May 2025, so no, I am not saying 8,900 is the number today. I am saying those were numbers coming from inside Israeli military intelligence. And they were nowhere near the numbers being said publicly at the time. I repeat 21,283 children. You can argue about Hamas. You can argue about military targets. You can argue about numbers and definitions and who counts as what. But you cannot argue those children back to life.

They are dead.

And there is something deeply disturbing to me about having to prove that Palestinian children deserve the same humanity we immediately understand belongs to Israeli children. They all deserved to grow up, every single one of them. And this is where I get angry because somehow if I am not careful I can be accused of antisemitism.

Let me make something else clear, Judaism is not the Israeli government. Jewish people are not the Israeli government and I refuse to make Jewish people responsible for the actions of Israel any more than I will make Palestinian people responsible for the actions of Hamas. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded in 2025 that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has not made a final ruling on whether Israel has violated the Genocide Convention.

Genocide - Let that sink in!

I know I am being a bit controversial today, but sometimes we need to stop and think.

As always stay safe and well my friends.