The Israeli Embassy in Gaza and the Israeli Bombing of the Gaza Strip: Is Israel merciful? Palestinians are vicious, Israelis are merciful

One reason I’m afraid that the worst is yet to come in the Middle East is that the mutual dehumanization is the most savage I’ve ever seen it in decades of on-the-ground reporting in the region.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is destroying tunnels, ammunition dumps and Hamas fighters, yes. But I’m afraid it’s also helping to pulverize the recognition of shared humanity that in the long run allows people to live beside one another in peace. The United States and other countries are already being filled with poisonous hatred.

I was thinking about this as I drove the other day to meet some Gazans who were temporarily allowed to visit Israel and became stuck in East Jerusalem. My Israeli taxi driver refused to enter the Palestinian neighborhood (“If I go there, I won’t make it out”) and finally abandoned me on the side of the road to get a Palestinian taxi. And then when I got to my destination, I interviewed a sweet 57-year-old Gazan woman who was talking to me about the war and told me that she approved of Hamas’s attacks on Israeli civilians.

That conversation pretty much broke my heart. Such bigotry is nurtured by Hamas propaganda but also by Israeli bombing of Gaza: The woman said she had lost two cousins to Israeli fire, including a young woman married only a year ago, and she weeps daily at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

Meanwhile, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the escalation of the ground operation on Saturday, he cited biblical references to the Amalekites, who were the target of a divine genocide. God ordered that men and women, children and infants should be put to death. Netanyahu wasn’t advocating thatliteral policy, but he has a code word for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” And this too breaks my heart.

There are of course many other voices that are merciful and sensible, and I’ve highlighted them previously. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

Eyad al-Sarraj, who died in 2013, once lamented that extremists need each other to support them. He said that the blockade of Gaza had turned Hamas fanatics into popular heroes.

Israeli air strikes and civilian attacks in the Gaza Strip are primed to explode, says Susan Hammash, an Israeli refugee council employee

The videos verified by the New York Times showed the aftermath of the airstrike in the Falluja neighborhood, which happened half a mile away from Tuesday’s strike. The destruction shown is of similar magnitude, with several large buildings completely flattened. Rescue workers and residents can be seen digging through the rubble and carrying what appear to be injured and dead people, including children.

On Wednesday, the devastated neighborhood, where local officials say dozens were killed and hundreds were wounded in the Tuesday attack — the figures could not be independently confirmed — was hit again. A number of people were killed and injured in a new Israeli air strike in the Gazan Interior Ministry.

Ms. Hammad hadn’t heard from her cousin in days, when he told her he was hosting dozens of people in a four-bedroom apartment.

Sousan Hammad, 38, a writer and teacher in Brooklyn, said she had been frantically trying to reach family members in Jabaliya. Her father had grown up in Gaza, and in recent days she had been able to stay in contact with his side of the family, relaying their messages to relatives in the United States.

The anguish of living is getting worse by the day, as a result of the continuing communications failures, said Mr. Hammash, who is now taking shelter in southern Gaza.

“This is getting more insane every day,” Yousef Hammash, an employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council who was born in the Jabaliya neighborhood hit by the airstrike, said Wednesday.

A day after an Israeli airstrike thundered across a densely populated Gaza Strip neighborhood, Palestinians trying to reach family members there to learn their fates were met largely with unnerving silence.

He said that the Israeli army was failing to protect Palestinian civilians in occupied areas because of the military operations in Gaza.

United Nations officials say that since Oct. 7, the Israel Defense Forces and armed settlers have killed more than 120 Palestinians in the West Bank. Most of the deaths occurred in battles with Israeli soldiers.

The West Bank, which has been rocked by major uprisings before, feels primed to explode. And the worry, among Palestinians and the Israeli security establishment, is what happens if it does. If the violence in the West Bank spills over into the rest of the region, it may lead to another front in the war, raising the chance of a larger conflict.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war saw Israel capture the West Bank and Gaza. Israel left Gaza under a tight blockade in 2005 after it withdrew from the area.

These communities, often built on strategic hilltops and encircled by walls and razor wire, are interspersed among a patchwork of Palestinian cities and towns administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous Palestinian body. Roughly half a million Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, alongside an estimated 2.7 million Palestinians.

Many settlers reject Palestinians’ claim to the land, arguing that Jews have been living in this territory since biblical times and that Israel justly won the territory decades ago in war.

In recent days, threatening leaflets, widely presumed to have come from settler extremists, have been slipped under the windshield wipers of Palestinian cars.

“A great catastrophe will descend upon your heads soon,” read one flier. “We will destroy every enemy and expel you forcefully from our Holy Land that God has written for us. Wherever you are, you should carry your loads to where you came from. We are coming for you.”