Common humanity is the first thing to go in warfare, writes RNZ's Phil Vine. Photo: AFP / Mohammed Abed
Analysis - It's often said that truth is the first casualty of war.
If that's true, then humanity is second in line.
As the Israeli Defence Forces prepare a ground attack on Gaza, shifting concepts of humanity and its dark oppositional force, inhumanity, are being weighed and measured, promoted and deflected.
As distant observers we are asked to make an assessment from grainy images of bombed babies and kidnapped grandmothers about the degrees of humanity on either side.
Israeli politicians say they have suffered the biggest single loss of life since the establishment of the state 75 years ago, raising deep memories of European pogroms.
More than 1300 Israelis, mainly civilians, have been killed by Hamas militants who arrived from Gaza on motorbikes, trucks, speedboats and motorised paragliders, blowing holes in the security wall and widening gaps with bulldozers.
They mowed down concertgoers at a music festival and threw grenades at people hiding on kibbutzim - taking as many as 150 hostages, live bargaining chips, back to the Gaza enclave where Hamas is based.
These actions are made possible by a suspension of humanity. The inability to see your victims as people like yourselves.
Dehumanisation is an active tool of modern warfare, fought in the age of the 15-second video.
Hamas social media clips show young music fans cowering in holes in the ground, at the points of guns, being referred to by their captors as "pigs".
The inability or unwillingness to see the opposing side as human beings, to instead regard them as sub-human or animals is a necessary pre-requisite for absolute war - conflict without restrictions - enabling the very worst behaviour imaginable.
A picture taken outside a hotel in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon shows a car destroyed in a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2023. Photo: AFP
It allows the suspension of protective humanising processes which would ordinarily prevent soldiers from targeting civilians.
And now the bombs fall on Gaza. In the first six days of the war Israel says it's dropped 6000. The number of dead children, Palestinian health officials say, is greater than 500.
There are 2.3 million Palestinians living on a 41km long strip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the State of Israel.
Gaza, originally a conglomeration of refugee camps, has grown into one of the most heavily populated places on earth.
One by one, its neighbourhoods are being flattened by rolling airstrikes.
The lone power plant has stopped running. Israel's government has turned a 16-year economic blockade into a state of siege.
Supplies of fuel, food and fresh water have been cut off.
Announcing the siege, defence minister Yoav Gallant said: "we are fighting beasts (or human animals depending on which translation you use) and will act accordingly".
On both sides, the accusation of inhumanity is being used as a justification for waging war on civilians.
Highly emotive interviews with survivors of the Hamas attacks and families of the hostages describe "barbaric" experiences.
On the sixth day of the conflict the office of Benjamin Netanyahu posted photos of a baby in a pool of blood and the charred bodies of two other children on social media.
The Israeli prime minister shared them with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who had just flown into Tel Aviv.
Blinken speaks of the value that Americans place on "human life and human dignity" - that's "who we are," he says.
The ability of a newly formed Israeli unity government and Hamas to uphold some form of that ideal will have a major impact on the direction of this conflict, and the collateral human damage.
Throughout history the suspension of humanity has long enabled atrocities.
Look at the Holocaust, look at the terrors of Stalin, the Killing Fields.
Exterminate the cockroaches, was the cry of the Rwandan genocide.
As observers from far away, we are asked to judge accusations of inhumanity as we witness the opening salvos of what might become the mass extermination of civilians.
We are expected to weigh the pictures of dead babies, with a tiny infant lying in the middle of a huge orange stretcher or a lifeless child in the arms of a father, its back to the camera in a pink stretch and grow, one arm dangling.
Balance up the abduction of an 85-year-old woman in a golf cart with a inert two-year-old lifted from the rubble of a bombed building, and they all take us to a place of terrible outrage.
A man finds his way along a debris-strewn street following Israeli air strikes in Gaza City on October 7, 2023. Photo: MOHAMMED ABED / AFP
To try and balance atrocity is a fool's errand. Each deserves its own investigation and condemnation.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced many millions of people and has its roots in a colonial act carried out nearly a century ago.
Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has been tracking conflict-related deaths since September 2000.
The overwhelming majority of the deaths are Palestinian and have been for almost 14 years.
For every 15 people killed in the conflict, 13 are Palestinian and two are Israeli.
On Friday, the number of dead in Gaza at more than 1500 surpassed the number of Israelis killed in the Hamas attack. The bombing didn't stop.
The concept of proportionality does seem to apply.
In President Joe Biden's first major statement after the Hamas attack he said that the US stood by Israel but that said it was important that their ally operated "by the rules of law".
The Geneva Conventions do unequivocally forbid the taking of hostages. However, the rules around a siege like the one in Gaza are less clear.
Under laws of armed conflict a siege is acceptable so long as the target is military and the aim isn't to starve the civilian population.
How do you assess the decision to cut off fuel to power generators which keep the hospitals running? Hospitals that are full of thousands of Palestinians injured in sustained Israeli bombing.
An article on the International Committee of the Red Cross website says legally justifying sieges in a time of war is a "slippery method of thinking".
The Israeli Defence Force claims that Hamas uses civilians of Gaza as human shields. That their infrastructure is scattered among places where people live.
Protecting civilians under these conditions is incredibly challenging. Though it does not serve as a humane argument for killing innocents or perceived collaborators.
Labels are crucial to humanity.
When talking about Hamas, Israeli spokespeople invariably refer to the militants as terrorists.
The Chief Rabbi of Britain has criticised the BBC for not using the expression terrorists to describe Hamas militants. He said it showed they weren't impartial.
Veteran war reporter John Simpson staged a spirited response insisting that the use of the t-word immediately designated one side as baddies and the other as goodies.
A Palestinian man reacts as he stands amid the destruction in the aftermath of Israeli bombardment in al-Karama district in Gaza City on October 11, 2023. Photo: AFP / Mahmud Hams
This simplistic dichotomy hides a more complicated truth - there are goodies and baddies on both sides.
To maintain humanity in times of conflict we perhaps need to nurture simultaneous and contradictory thoughts.
We need to entertain the thought that either side is capable of anything - bad deeds and good.
The complete suspension of humanity and the promotion of good vs evil takes us to an intractable place where the concept of peace and a cessation of hostilities is unthinkable.
The practice of looking for humanity in the actions and words of others, especially our enemies, may not solve the Middle East crisis, but it may help prevent an agnostic conflict turning into the slaughter of absolute war.
Phil Vine is a senior journalist for Worldwatch at Radio New Zealand. He has reported from a number of war zones and worked for the International Red Cross during the Israel/Lebanon conflict.
