People inspect the area of Al-Ahli hospital where Palestinians were killed in a blast that Western intelligence has blamed on an errant Palestinian rocket meant for Israel, in Gaza City, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot

When I visited Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip last year, a former senior Israeli military official outlined the basic details of how he thought Israel might overthrow Hamas, should this ever be required.

He laid out how many Israeli and Palestinian deaths could be expected, and how long the campaign might take. But that was all theoretical, I told myself. Israel would never undertake such a costly campaign.

October 7 changed everything. The unfathomable brutality Hamas unleashed that weekend has so far left more than 1,400 Israelis dead. Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been murdered in a single day. Just as Hamas’ attack was unprecedented, so too will Israel’s response be. Israel can no longer simply deter Hamas; it must destroy it.

While the global outpouring of support for Israel and Jewish communities has been moving, that will soon change.

With Hamas deliberately using Gazans as human shields so as to maximize civilian deaths for global sympathy — and lying about casualty numbers and alleged Israeli attacks on civilians — Israel’s response and the subsequent civilian casualties will strain its international support, perhaps more intensely than ever before.

This will also reveal who Israel’s true friends are, and who will support the Jewish state when it does what is necessary to rid Gaza of the genocidal death cult that is Hamas.

The toll on Gazans is already enormous. As of writing, Hamas reports that thousands have been killed — but it’s impossible to know the true numbers. On October 13, attempting to minimize civilian deaths, Israel instructed 1.1 million Palestinians to leave northern Gaza. In response, Hamas set up roadblocks to prevent people from fleeing.

Egypt, which along with Israel, blockades Gaza, is rejecting demands to let Palestinians enter its territory.

As Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza continues, and when the expected ground incursion begins, the Palestinian death toll will climb, as will international outrage and pressure on Israel. For many onlookers, the atrocities Hamas committed against Jewish grandmothers and babies will soon be overlooked for the tragedy now befalling Palestinians in Gaza.

One massacre, they’ll say, doesn’t justify another.

And so, to those criticizing Israel’s response as disproportionate and blaming it for civilian deaths, I ask: what is the proportionate response to a group that executes babies, rapes women next to their dead friends’ bodies, kidnaps Holocaust survivors, burns children until their bodies are charred, and murders a grandmother in cold blood before stealing her phone and uploading a video of the killing to her Facebook account?

Such barbarity demands an unprecedented response. In the war to rid Iraqi cities of ISIS, the battle for Mosul alone killed up to 11,000 civilians and left utter destruction in its wake. But ISIS was defeated, and the world is better off for it. Israel must do the same in Gaza, despite the human cost.

Indeed, every innocent death in Gaza should be mourned. I’ll never forget when, during a recent trip to the West Bank, I came across a handwritten memorial to Gazan children killed during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. The image is seared into my brain. Name after name after name of children whose lives were cut short through the most horrific of circumstances. Those children deserved long, joyful lives. To call their deaths a tragedy is a gross understatement.

But make no mistake. Hamas, which uses Palestinians as human shields and deliberately places its terrorist infrastructure in schools, hospitals, and mosques, and fires rockets from heavily populated civilian areas is to blame for civilian deaths in Gaza. (Remember that in 2014, The Washington Post reported that Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital had “become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders.”)

Israel will continue going to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, such as warning Gazans before it bombs certain buildings, but, as The New York Times’ David French, who served in Iraq as a lawyer for the US military, explains, “the law of war does not prevent Israel from destroying a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population. It can be done.”

French also addresses Hamas’ deliberate placement of fighters and military equipment in civilian hubs, violating the principle of distinction, which requires combatants to distinguish between, and distinguish themselves from, civilians.

“When Hamas abandons the principle of distinction, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results,” French writes. “If Hamas fights from a hospital — or stores munitions in a hospital — damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility.”

The other misguided criticism often directed at Israel is that it acts disproportionately in Gaza due to the high number of Palestinian deaths.

But proportionality is not determined by comparing each side’s body count. As French notes, “proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas.”

Rather, proportionality is a principle forbidding militaries from causing civilian deaths or similar damage that is excessive in relation to the expected military advantage. In other words, if Israel’s military goal — and moral responsibility — is to eliminate Hamas, then it is permitted to do what it must in order to achieve that aim, so long as the collateral damage is not excessive. Tragic as they are, high civilian death tolls do not necessarily indicate war crimes nor disproportionate force.

This war in Gaza will extract an unspeakable human cost. But Israel did not start, nor did it want, this war. It is simply protecting its citizens from a sadistic terrorist organization that, if it could, would murder every single man, woman, and child in Israel.

If the world can’t recognize that — if it can’t stand by the Jewish state when it does what any other democracy would — then all the sympathy following October 7 was pointless.

Josh Feldman is an Australian writer who focuses primarily on Israeli and Jewish issues. Twitter: @joshrfeldman