There really are no winners here.

Let’s be realistic. Hamas fucked around and found out. You don’t go around provoking a regional superpower with decades-old guns and improvised weapons. There was never a situation where Israel wasn’t going to go in and curb stomp them in response. Israel has always been open about this.

But the response they gave is beyond inhumane. They’ve decided that the best course of action is to just “kill 'em all and let God sort it out”. The vast majority of their targets so far have been civilian targets, and they defend their actions by essentially saying that since they can’t tell the difference between Hamas and the civilians, they’re just going to mow down everybody. Hospitals have been bombed. Supplies have been all but cut off. Civilian vehicles targeted on video, with the IDF’s official response being barely more than “sucks to be them.” Thousands of civilians dead, and Israel’s response is to say “we’re just getting started” and advancing a ground attack.

There is no justification for that response. None. If Israel had any chance of getting regional or global support for their actions, they pissed that away the second they thought bombing a hospital was a good idea. If they think that indiscriminately bombing civilian targets is going to magically stop their enemies from interfering, they thought wrong (as evidenced by the fighting along the Lebanese border). If anything, Israel just gave them the justification that they have been looking for and probably just made their own situation exponentially worse.

At this point, I really do believe that Biden needs to withdraw all but humanitarian support from Israel. Helping to arm Israel while they commit genocide in real time isn’t going to help our position with allies in the middle east. And neither side are exactly saints here. The US should take this into consideration, withdraw military support for Israel, offer humanitarian aid to civilians in both Israel and Gaza, and say they no longer take any position on the conflict outside of protecting US interests.

I would think it would take a hell of a lot to make a terrorist organization like Hamas look like the sympathetic victim. And while I’m not saying they are, Israel seems to be speedrunning their attempts to make them look like they are.