"There are no innocents in Gaza"
"There are no innocents in Gaza" is a statement heard from all sides these days, aiming to justify the annihilation of Gaza's population. To our horror, this annihilation currently includes 19,424 children murdered in Gaza, 5,000 of them under the age of 5, alongside 10,138 women and 4,695 elderly people. This annihilation continues at every moment, so this number grows larger, day after day.
Beyond the legitimization of bloodshed that this statement reflects, it enables a process of dehumanization and delegitimization of the Palestinian population in Gaza. This is a process decades in the making, during which Gaza's population has been invisible to the majority of the Israeli public, culminating in the statement "There are no innocents in Gaza." Another landmark in this process was the intensification of collective punishment against Gaza's population after Hamas's takeover of the Strip in 2007. The words used then to strip Gaza's residents of their humanity and individuality were "they are all Hamas there" and "they all chose Hamas." This was despite the fact that Hamas's takeover of the Strip (though it did win a majority of 76 out of 132 seats) was carried out through battles with Fatah supporters and the killing of anyone who opposed them—not exactly a democratic method. Two years prior, since the Disengagement in 2005, the blockade on all of Gaza had already begun. Israel controlled Gaza's land, sea, and air crossings (except for two crossings controlled by Egypt), and significantly restricted the movement of people and goods, and access to opportunities and employment. The suffering of life under blockade included a skyrocketing unemployment rate, a severe shortage of electricity and clean water, and the denial of freedom of movement. Due to the process of dehumanization, this suffering was (and still is) invisible to most of the public in Israel (and it is also important to say, of all Palestinians wherever they are—within the state of Israel and in the West Bank). This process brings to the forefront Edward Said's claim that "the Orient was viewed as a uniform and eternal category, even though in reality it is comprised of different worlds and infinite stories. This flattening is the result of a need to control, not to know."
Parallel to these processes, Israeli support for Hamas began. Netanyahu: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy"; Smotrich: "Hamas is an asset." And then we awoke to the terrible morning of October 7th, and the Gazans—who over the many years of blockade had become invisible, a flattened collective—burst into the forefront of Israeli consciousness in a terrifying and horrifying manner. The murderous, sexual, and sadistic violence of the massacre’s participants definitively branded the Gazans with the mark of Cain of “there are no innocents in Gaza.”
In reality, about 6,000 Gazans participated in the massacre, of them about 3,800 were Nukhba forces and the rest civilians—a shocking and staggering figure in itself. One can also assume that there was identification and malicious joy among some Gazans. As we see, feelings of vengeance exist on "both sides"—vengeance for decades of suffering under the yoke of occupation, vengeance for the October 7th massacre, and joy at the suffering of the other side. These feelings are human in situations of massive trauma, even if there is no doubt that social and moral standards demand they not be acted upon in reality. True leadership should contain calls for revenge and rage, not fuel them. The perception that flattens Gaza's residents into a uniform category devoid of subjectivity has led to the accusation that 2 million other residents participated in the massacre and to the application of this horrific murderousness to everyone in equal measure.
If we return to Edward Said—the Gazan subject has no human depth; he is denied the right to emotion, to wishes for freedom and for a decent and safe life for himself and his children. Anyone who maintained professional and social ties with residents of Gaza knows how many opposed Hamas, and how much fear there was of Hamas's cruelty towards those who showed opposition. Asaf David, a Middle East expert who follows the media in Gaza and has close ties with many Gazans, writes: "Since the beginning of the war, and even more so as it became clear this was a declared campaign for the ethnic cleansing and erasure of Gaza, Hamas supporters in Gaza have become defensive, the indifferent have become opponents of Hamas, and the opponents have come to despise Hamas. Both groups, tens of thousands of innocent people who had no hand in October 7th, are suffering death, injury, depression, illness, anxiety, destruction, and the shame of starvation. By commission and by omission."
But in Israel, these voices, which present Gazans as human subjects, are not heard. A corrupt and self-serving political leadership (which, as mentioned, maintained Hamas for years with Qatari money while weakening the Palestinian Authority) and a mobilized and silenced media are exploiting Israeli feelings of revenge to amplify the criminal perception that "there are no innocents in Gaza." All this is to legitimize the continuation of what has already been defined by experts as genocide and to satiate the Israeli public's thirst for revenge.
This blindness and denial can be seen in a conversation one of us had with a mother whose son is stationed on the Gaza border and is firing, in her words, "precision weapons" into Gaza:
Me: "Do you sometimes think about who he is shooting at there?"
Mother: "No… and I'm sure he doesn't think about it either," she rushes to tell me without my asking. "Since 10/7 and as long as our hostages are there, I have no room to think about them…"
Me: "And maybe there are innocents there that he's shooting at?"
Mother: "How can you know? Maybe there are Hamas supporters there?"
The "mother"—perhaps represents a collective motherhood that does not want to know, that attacks thought itself. This position creates a split and retreats into the stance of the absolute victim, while the lust for revenge for the insult, humiliation, and pain of the trauma of 10/7 knows no satiety.
Israel clings to the image of the victim and refuses to recognize its own aggressive parts. Kohut wrote about the narcissistic injury—colored by feelings of inferiority, shame, defectiveness, and humiliation—as having the potential for boundless aggression that lacks reality testing. The other loses his subjectivity; his very separateness and desires are experienced as an insult and an obstacle to the realization of grandiose needs, and he is therefore worthy of elimination. Thus, this week at a demonstration, facing a line of people holding pictures of children murdered in Gaza, a woman walked by and said while pointing at the pictures: "This one will be a female terrorist… this one will be a terrorist… this one will be a terrorist…" In her mind, the dead child can rise up and kill. This distortion of reality is no different from the claim that all children, from their first day, are not innocent and will grow up to be terrorists (and perhaps they already are terrorists)—and therefore deserve to die.
In a post from September 5, '25, Asaf David quotes the words of Yosser al-Ghoch, a writer from Gaza, who addresses a fighter pilot with a call to restore the humanity, feelings, and histories of both himself and his targets: "My dear enemy… Do you have human feelings in you? Did you stop for a moment, my enemy friend, to look at those little faces through your thermal lenses? Did it occur to you that in the small bodies your bombs tear to shreds, beat hearts similar to those of your own children? … Now you tell yourself they were the children of terrorists, putting monstrous masks on them to make it easier for you to destroy them. You forgot that you are the one who conquered the land, killed the grandfather, expelled the father."
The more the killing continues, the more it seems that parts of our individual and collective soul are dying. The more we convince ourselves that there is no one to have compassion for—that it is even dangerous to have compassion—the more a part of us dies. And again, in front of the line of people holding pictures of the murdered children, another young man passed by and pointed, picture after picture, while saying: "I murdered him, I murdered him too, I murdered her too, and I did it to protect you." We are killing the Gazans, but at the same time, we are killing ourselves as a society. We are crying out to bring these dead parts back to life! To stop closing our eyes, to look squarely and see those innocent people—tortured, murdered, starved, displaced—as human beings with depth, body, and soul, and not just a flat target board for Israel's lust for revenge and its drive for vengeance and domination.
In a society responsible for acts of killing, where humanity is stripped away both from the people of Gaza and from its own members, silence is not neutral – it is a mark of criminal indifference, and in effect, complicity. Unlike Gazans, forced to live under a brutal dictatorship, Israeli citizens still live in a democracy – however partial it may be. That is precisely why silence within a democracy is graver still. While we are still free to speak, it is our obligation to do so: to protest, to raise our voices, and to use every means at our disposal as citizens to cry out against Israel’s murderous and vengeful violence in Gaza.
The human gaze we direct toward Gaza is also what will safeguard our own humanity.
And the heart breaks
And for all this there is no remedy
And all that is tender and compassionate is now silenced
The stones of language crack,
Wild like the taste of blood
Sirens from all the slits circle around
Around and the heart breaks
[…]
And the morning is full of smoke
Smoke in the heart on the bus to work
A sooty heart, not to see not to speak
Near the ruins a child shivers
One is crying,
And for all this there is no remedy
(From: "And for all this there is no remedy" by Tali Latowicki, published in an anthology that called for leaving Gaza during the Operation “Cast Lead” offensive in 2009.)