Eliyahu Gasson | editor-in-chief

A good rule for opinion writing is to select a topic or event you’re interested in. For me, that’s been Israel’s actions in Gaza since Hamas attacked the southern half of the country on Oct. 7, 2023. This will be the third time I write about it — a fact sure to irritate or upset my family, though they are well aware of how I feel on the topic.

In December, I wrote an article in which I proclaimed the Zionist project a failure for what it has done to worsen Jewish safety and further damage our reputation. There are some notions I wish to pull back since writing that piece.

“… it seems that the Arabs in the region want the destruction of the Jews as much as the Jews want the destruction of the Arabs,” was a stupid thing to write. My thinking was that I ought to be conciliatory, when what I did was boil the conflict down to an ethnic one. In reality, Jews and Arabs lived relatively peaceful lives together before the establishment of the State of Israel.

Secondly, I was under the impression that we were stuck — that there was no apparent solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. I overplayed the influence of Iran and its proxies and ended on perhaps a criminally passive line: “The most we can do, at least we who care about the wellbeing of others, is hope that as few people die as is possible and rescind our support for Israel, at least in its current form.”

My opinion on the matter has changed drastically between then and now. Here’s why:

On Monday, Aug. 25 around 10 a.m., Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. The largest hospital in southern Gaza was struck three times by the Jewish state, killing at least 22 people. Among them were health workers, emergency response crews and journalists.

The first strike killed Reuters journalist Hussam Al-Masri, who was filming on an exterior staircase. Nine minutes later, the second attack killed four more journalists: Ahmed Abu Aziz, Mariam Dagga, Mohammad Salama and Moaz Abu Taha.

Israel’s initial response can be summed up as: “Whoopsie, we’re sowwy. It won’t happen again, promise.”

On that day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the attacks a “tragic mishap.”

Following a well-established pattern from Jerusalem, the Israeli Defense Forces came out and told the world with a straight face that they were actually targeting Hamas terrorists, and managed to kill six of them while continuing to insist that they don’t intentionally target civilians. A bold claim to be sure, given they are notorious for targeting areas heavily trafficked by civilians, like schools and hospitals.

In fact, Israel is no stranger to targeting civilians. On Aug. 10, Israel killed four journalists reporting from Gaza for Al-Jazeera: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal. Unlike the attack on Nasser Hospital, these journalists were occupying a tent used by the media as a makeshift headquarters.

Again, following a well-established pattern, Israel claimed that Sharif was the leader of a Hamas cell as a justification for the attack.

According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a France based non-profit that advocates freedom of information, roughly 220 journalists have been killed by Israeli strikes since the start of the war.

That’s undeniably a lot of people — 120 more than are in the United States Senate.

Hamas or not, eliminating reporters on the ground in Gaza benefits the Israeli narrative, especially since the Knesset refuses to allow foreign journalists to enter the Gaza Strip.

Gaza is in a state of mass starvation. Organizations like the World Food Programme, UNICEF and the

Palestine Red Crescent Society, who had been providing food aid to Palestinians in Gaza, have been hampered by restrictions imposed by Israel. Since May 2025, the cruel chaotic food distribution has mainly been handled by the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, a U.S. backed organization.

Anyone can see the devastation for themselves from news outlets on television and online. The attacks on Nasser Hospital were filmed by Reuters journalist Hatem Omar and live streamed by independent Jordanian outlet Al Ghad TV.

The evidence of starvation and attacks on civilians in Gaza gathered by journalists has led to multiple groups including Amnesty International, International Federation for Human Rights and even Physicians for Human Rights-Israel calling this a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Even more recently, on Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, backed a U.N. resolution declaring that Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip met the definition of of genocide set out in Article II of the 1948 U.N. convention on genocide.

It’s hard to believe it took so long to come to this conclusion and I am ashamed that my own stance was so weak before now. Now, I believe, the solution is not simply to hope for less death. The solution is to take action. If this is genocide than we need to be firm in our stance that there should be no support for Israel at all. Not in its current form or any other form. This is a state founded along ethnic lines and what has happened is almost an inevitability. I have no love for a country that starves and kills civilians and attempts to hide its crimes by killing the people with the guts to report on it.

None of this is to say there is no future for Jews in the region. As stated above, Jews were living in Palestine and the rest of the Middle East along with their Arab neighbors before the establishment of a Jewish state. Jews can live well, perhaps better, without Israel. Palestinians certainly would.

Eliyahu Gasson can be reached at gassone@duq.edu