What I saw from the frontline of Israel-Hamas war

The Indian view, an unequivocal calling out of terrorism but a firm underscoring of the rights of the Palestinian people, is a nuanced response

As I return to India after nine days of reporting from the frontline of the conflict in Israel and its military retaliation to the Hamas terror attack, I am amazed and aghast at the equivocations, binaries, polarities and extreme positions being taken all around me.

In an environment of raging tribalism and irrationality, social media is fuelling ignorance, illiberalism and insanity, even in India, where the tensions in West Asia have no direct bearing on us.

There’s a pretty obvious and commonsensical truth staring us in the face. What Hamas did to Israeli civilians — razing houses to the ground, burning entire families alive, shooting infants as they slept in cots — is a horrific act of terrorism. Israel, like any other country, has the absolute right to retaliate. But it needs a better thought-through counter-terrorism response that does not brutally punish hundreds of thousands of helpless and hapless Gazan civilians.

If you feel the need to rationalise, explain, justify or qualify what Hamas did or, on the other hand, don’t feel the heartbreak of the awful collective suffering unfolding in Gaza, you need to examine both your intellectual consistency and (lack of) empathy. Unfortunately, noise, bigotry, coarseness and intolerance have captured all reasonable space for public debate.