Late last week, I read a headline in Israel’s oldest newspaper, Haaretz, that left me horror-struck: “30,000 Dead. A Stampede of the Starving.” In just over four months, 30,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza and, last Thursday, hundreds more killed and wounded while charging for food in the famine-gripped north.

Furious debate rages over exactly how these people died – crushed, gunned down, or a combination of the two – but what seems certain is that Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of desperate, famished people trying to reach aid trucks.

Mourners receive the bodies of victims of an Israeli strike on March 2 in Rafah, Gaza. Credit: Getty

For four months, I have resisted requests to comment further on this conflict after having waded in with two articles in October. My first said that, as a Jew, despite the pure evil of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, I stood with both Israelis and Palestinians. My second said that, although I had no answers for how to destroy Hamas, an organisation whose founding charter calls for the obliteration of Israel, surely it could not be done by starving, besieging, and terrifying millions of innocent people – nor killing tens of thousands of others – as retribution.

I then stopped writing. To write is to sometimes bleed onto the page. This felt too much, and besides, who would listen? Certainly no one with the power to end this disaster.

“What more can we do, David?” my friend Stephanie wrote as the numbers of dead and wounded kept mounting. “Nothing,” was my first and second thought because the momentum towards further destruction felt unstoppable. “It’s only going to get worse before it gets worse,” the man in the plane seat next to me had predicted two weeks earlier.

Stephanie’s email arrived at the end of January, along with an article about the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel could be engaged in acts of genocide. “What hideous fate was this?” I’d asked myself. “The victims of genocide now possibly inflicting genocide themselves.” Then the further thought: “Is this what centuries of persecution does to a people? Inures them to the pain and suffering of another people?”

Then I read comments from American Jewish scholar Shaul Magid on his Facebook page. “I look at the morning news, and what do I see? Myriad ways we (Jews-Israel) claim that we are being framed, that we are not to blame, that we are doing nothing wrong, that we are justified, and it is they, only they (fill in everything from Hamas to the ICC), who are evil. No complicity, no error, no responsibility, no sin.”

I wanted more Jewish voices to be raised in protest, like that of US Senator Bernie Sanders, who kept calling for a ceasefire, and American playwright Eve Ensler, who described the forced relocation of entire families into “safe” zones, bereft of food, water, medicine or fuel, as “sickening” and “grotesque”.