The Israeli campaign in Gaza began as a response to the October 7 attack and its particular brutality. It is wrong, however, to view the Israeli fighting as a case of reciprocal brutality.
Prominent among the issues at stake in the war in Gaza is the scope of civilian fatalities. This is only natural. Whatever the political causes behind the war, human suffering rightly deserves the attention of public opinion and political leaders. For the Biden administration, the rhetoric around the death count in Gaza is taking on ever greater importance. President Joe Biden declared that “you can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead,” relying on the widely disseminated figure from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health. Senator Elizabeth Warren similarly blamed “[Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and his right-wing government” for killing “nearly 30,000 Palestinians.” The head of foreign policy for the European Union, Josep Borrell, has invoked the same number but mistakenly claimed that it represents exclusively civilian deaths. In fact, the Gazan authorities do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, so the number 30,000 includes both civilians and combatants.