The Impossible Conflict
The Difficulty of Writing This
There is no neutral position on Israel and Gaza. Every sentence written about this conflict will be read by some as insufficient condemnation and by others as unfair accusation. The language itself is contested: "occupation" or "security presence," "resistance" or "terrorism," "genocide" or "military operation," "settlers" or "communities." The choice of words signals allegiance before the argument begins.
This piece does not attempt to resolve that problem. It attempts to document what is known, to present the perspectives of both populations as they understand their own situations, and to identify the structural conditions that make this conflict so resistant to resolution. The purpose is not to assign blame symmetrically — the suffering is not symmetrical. The purpose is to describe the trap.
October 7 and Its Aftermath
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched an assault on southern Israel that killed approximately 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Families were attacked in their homes in kibbutzim. Attendees of an outdoor music festival were killed or taken hostage. More than 240 people were taken into the Gaza Strip as hostages.
A March 2024 United Nations report found evidence that some victims were subjected to sexual violence before they were killed. The UN's special envoy on sexual violence in conflict reported "reasonable grounds" to believe sexual assaults including rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations. The UN also reported "clear and convincing information" that some hostages held in Gaza were subjected to rape and sexualised torture.
The attack was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. It shattered assumptions about Israel's security capabilities and produced a national trauma whose political consequences continue to shape Israeli policy.
Israel's military response has been, by any measure, devastating. As of February 2026, at least 75,227 people have been reported killed — over 73,000 Palestinians and over 2,000 Israelis — according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A November 2025 study by the Max Planck Institute estimated total violent deaths in Gaza between 100,000 and 126,000, of which 27 percent were children under 15 and 24 percent were women.
The Israeli Perspective
Israelis live surrounded by hostile neighbours and non-state actors that have, at various points, fired rockets at civilian areas, carried out suicide bombings, and explicitly called for the destruction of the Jewish state. The memory of the Holocaust is not metaphorical. It is within living memory for a declining but still present generation, and within family memory for most of the population.
The October 7 attacks confirmed what many Israelis had long feared: that the threat was not theoretical. Hamas's charter has historically called for the destruction of Israel. The organisation's operational capacity, demonstrated on October 7, exceeded what Israeli intelligence had assessed. The failure of deterrence was total.
From this perspective, the military operation in Gaza is defensive. Israel argues that Hamas embeds its fighters and infrastructure within civilian areas, including schools, hospitals, and residential buildings, making civilian casualties an inevitable consequence of military action against a guerrilla force that deliberately uses its own population as cover. Israel has cited military successes including the elimination of Hamas's top leadership and the rescue of hostages.
The Israeli government's position is that its actions are necessary to dismantle Hamas's military capability and ensure that an attack like October 7 cannot happen again. Critics within Israel, including thousands who protest weekly in Tel Aviv, argue that the continuation of the war has not brought the hostages home and that the human cost has become disproportionate to the security achieved.
The Palestinian Perspective
Palestinians in Gaza live under conditions that predate October 7 by decades. Since Israel's disengagement in 2005, Gaza has been under a blockade that controls the movement of people and goods. The United Nations, international humanitarian organisations, and most academic commentators continue to regard Gaza as being under Israeli occupation due to Israel's control over the territory's external affairs, as affirmed by a 2024 International Court of Justice advisory opinion.
The population of approximately 2.3 million people has lived in one of the most densely populated areas on earth with limited access to clean water, electricity, medical care, and economic opportunity. Before October 7, unemployment in Gaza exceeded 40 percent. The average age of the population is approximately 18 years — meaning that most Gazans have known nothing but the blockade, and most have no memory of the political decisions that led to it.
Hamas has governed Gaza since 2007. Its leadership, including those who planned and ordered the October 7 attack, has been based partly outside Gaza — in Qatar, Turkey, and elsewhere. The gap between the living conditions of Hamas's external political leadership and the population they claim to represent is stark. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's political leader, was assassinated by Israel in Tehran in July 2024.
A December 2023 poll found that 72 percent of Palestinian respondents approved of the October 7 attacks, and about 90 percent did not believe Hamas committed atrocities during them. These numbers reflect not a moral consensus but the information environment: with no free press in Gaza, limited access to information from outside, and a population that has experienced decades of what it regards as collective punishment, the framing of events is shaped by lived experience more than by external documentation.
The Humanitarian Catastrophe
The scale of destruction in Gaza is documented by multiple international organisations:
At least 94 percent of Gaza's hospitals are damaged or destroyed. By August 2025, 1.9 million Gazans — approximately 90 percent of the population — were displaced and facing acute or catastrophic food shortages. Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid, justified by Israeli officials as necessary to prevent Hamas from controlling its distribution, has led to famine-like conditions according to the United Nations.
People in Gaza had access to less than 5 litres of water per day on average from October 2023 to July 2024 — one-third of the WHO's minimum standard for survival.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. A UN Human Rights Council report in September 2025 found reasonable grounds that Israel had committed four of five genocidal acts defined by international convention. Amnesty International separately concluded that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Israel has categorically rejected these characterisations.
The Trap
The structural conditions of the conflict are understood by policy analysts, historians, and diplomats. They are, in compressed form, these:
Israel cannot tolerate a hostile armed force on its border that has demonstrated both the intent and the capability to massacre its civilians. The existence of Hamas in its current form is, from the Israeli security perspective, an existential threat that must be eliminated.
Palestinians in Gaza cannot accept permanent blockade, periodic military operations that destroy their infrastructure, and governance by an organisation that uses their presence as a tactical advantage while its leadership lives in safety abroad. Their situation is, by any humanitarian measure, untenable.
Hamas, as an organisation, benefits from the continuation of the conflict. The worse conditions become in Gaza, the more its narrative of resistance is reinforced. The more aggressive Israel's response, the more international sympathy flows to the Palestinian cause and, by extension, to Hamas as the visible representative of that cause. The deaths of Palestinian civilians are not incidental to Hamas's strategy. They are, in a documented and strategically articulated sense, instrumental to it.
Israel, as an occupying power with overwhelming military superiority, bears the greater responsibility under international law for the protection of civilian life. That responsibility exists regardless of the tactical choices made by Hamas. The argument that "Hamas hides among civilians" may be factually accurate in many instances, but international humanitarian law does not permit the destruction of the civilian population in which combatants hide. The principle of proportionality requires military advantage to be weighed against expected civilian harm.
The People in Between
The people of Gaza did not choose Hamas. Hamas won a legislative election in 2006 and consolidated power by force in 2007. There have been no elections since. The median age of the population means that the majority of Gazans were children or not yet born when the last election took place.
The Israeli civilians killed on October 7 did not choose the policies of their government any more than the Palestinian civilians killed in the subsequent bombardment chose the governance of Hamas. Both populations are trapped in a conflict driven by political and military decisions made on their behalf, often against their expressed wishes, by leaders whose personal safety is rarely at stake.
The weekly protests in Tel Aviv, where thousands of Israelis demand an end to the war and the return of hostages, represent one form of this trapped population's agency. The Palestinians who attempt to flee bombardment zones, often multiple times, only to find that there is nowhere in Gaza that is genuinely safe, represent another.
What Balance Means
A balanced account of this conflict does not mean assigning equal blame. The casualties are not equal. The power is not equal. The agency is not equal.
A balanced account means acknowledging that Israel faces genuine security threats that no other democratic nation confronts in the same form. It means acknowledging that the Palestinian population of Gaza is enduring suffering on a scale that international organisations have described in the most severe terms available in international law. It means acknowledging that Hamas is an organisation that has demonstrated willingness to sacrifice the population it governs to advance its political and military objectives.
It means recognising that these truths coexist, that none of them cancels any other, and that the resolution of the conflict requires engaging with all of them simultaneously rather than selecting the ones that support a predetermined conclusion.
The people of Gaza need the war to stop. The people of Israel need to know that October 7 cannot happen again. Hamas needs to be replaced by a governance structure that prioritises the welfare of the population it represents. Israel needs to confront the question of what a post-war Gaza looks like, and whether permanent occupation is compatible with the democratic values it claims.
None of these things are currently happening. All of them are necessary. The distance between what is necessary and what is politically achievable is the space in which the conflict persists, and in which people continue to die.