This is not just war. This is not just “self-defense.” And this certainly isn’t balanced. What we’re witnessing in Gaza is a lopsided campaign of destruction, a crisis cloaked in diplomatic language, sanitized in headlines, and justified through decades of dehumanization. The Israel-Hamas war, like so many before it, demands more than political statements and selective grief. It demands truth. And the truth is uncomfortable.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a brutal assault, an undeniable act of violence that shook Israel to its core. But what followed was not justice. It was obliteration. What began as a military response quickly evolved into the systematic pulverization of Gaza, one of the most densely populated and impoverished areas in the world. Over 50,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children. Entire families erased. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps, flattened.
Yet the world still calls this “complex.
What’s complex about children being bombed as they sleep? About starving civilians being gunned down while rushing to food trucks? About denying two million people clean water, power, and medical aid?
The real complexity lies in the silence of global powers. The U.S. vetoed UN ceasefire resolutions while funding the same bombs that tear through Gaza’s neighborhoods. European governments issue cautious condemnations while maintaining lucrative arms deals. Humanitarian groups call it a famine, a genocide in slow motion, but the gears of politics keep grinding, greased with complicity.
Let’s be honest: this isn’t just a war between Israel and Hamas. This is a war against an entire population, a war waged with drones, tanks, and silence. Hamas does not equal Gaza, but Gaza is paying the price for decades of occupation, blockade, and apartheid. And anyone pretending this is symmetrical warfare is willfully ignoring history.
Israel has the right to security. But Palestinians have the right to exist.
And until we acknowledge that basic truth, until we stop hiding behind the excuse of “complexity”, this cycle of violence will never end. True reflection means confronting the uncomfortable: the colonial roots of the conflict, the power imbalance, the erasure of a people told their lives are negotiable.
This war demands more than reflection. It demands reckoning.
