After my last piece on October 7, someone left a comment that stopped me mid-scroll.
“It takes being a real human to write something like this,” they said. Then they added something I’ve been thinking about ever since:
“Hamas attacking soldiers and taking POWs are not war crimes. All civilian killings are potential war crimes. Targeting civilians and taking civilian hostages is absolutely a war crime. Hamas definitely committed war crimes on Oct. 7.
Israel has been committing war crimes since 1948. That does not justify Hamas committing war crimes.
Which also means that Israel has no justification for committing war crimes after Oct. 7. Those crimes include attacking anyone inside Gaza, as it is Israeli-occupied territory.”
That comment said, in a few tight lines, what whole conferences and TV panels have failed to say: that justice cannot wear a uniform.
The Law of the Unequal
I have spent the past year watching a strange inversion unfold. The side that speaks of resistance justifies terror. The side that speaks of self-defense rains bombs on a trapped population. Both speak of survival. Both speak of God. Neither speaks of law.
International law, of course, is not perfect. But it is the last fragile thread that holds the idea of shared morality between nations. The Geneva Conventions were not written for perfect times; they were written for war. They remind us that even during horror, the line between soldier and civilian must hold.
When Hamas crossed that line on October 7, the world saw barbarity in motion.
When Israel crossed it again, and again, and again in Gaza, the world looked away.
In Gaza, parents now sleep in shifts. One stays awake to listen for drones, the other curls around the children as if their arms could shield them from steel. Bread lines stretch through bomb dust. Babies drink water mixed with ash because it is all their mothers can find.
The Mirror of 1948
The commenter was right to bring up 1948. That year, the foundations of the modern Middle East were laid on broken promises and uprooted families. Villages erased. Children made stateless.
What began as displacement became occupation. What began as security became apartheid.
Israel’s long history of impunity doesn’t erase Hamas’s crimes, but it does explain the rage that birthed them. And yet, if we start justifying cruelty through memory, there will never be an end to vengeance.
I think often of what my father used to say when we spoke of wars at the dinner table in Karachi. The radio hummed in the background, the smell of lentils thick in the air. He would pause mid-bite, look at me, and say, “Son, if both sides are right, it means both sides are wrong in some way.” Those words have aged better than most governments.
The Human Cost That No One Counts
Each time I see footage from Gaza now, it feels like déjà vu layered with disbelief. Hospitals turned to ashes. Whole families gone.
Israel says it is targeting Hamas. But the rubble always hides children.
And yet, even as I write this, some will say that condemning Hamas is betrayal and condemning Israel is antisemitism. That is how far we have drifted from the language of conscience.
The truth is simpler.
Hamas committed war crimes. Israel is committing them still.
No flag makes that right.
Somewhere in Tel Aviv, a mother still keeps her son’s room ready, waiting for a hostage exchange that may never come. In Rafah, another mother digs with her hands because the excavators have run out of fuel. Two women, same night, same prayer — “Please let my child live.”
Why the Comment Mattered
What moved me most was not the legal accuracy but the human honesty in that reader’s words. To say both sides are guilty takes courage in a world addicted to sides.
Maybe that’s what being “a real human” means now — refusing to let horror blind us to principle.
In Munich, my daughter told me how her German colleagues now whisper around the topic, afraid to choose the wrong sentence. “No one wants to talk about Gaza,” she said. “It’s like grief itself became dangerous.” I told her silence can be its own kind of war crime too.
We cannot control armies or governments, but we can decide how we speak about them.
And sometimes, that choice — to speak evenly, painfully, without loyalty — is the only act of resistance left.
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