In one rendition, everything that occurred on 7 October owes to the Israeli occupation of Palestinians – the Gaza Strip, though under siege, isn’t occupied by Israel, unlike the West Bank – and Hamas’s attack was therefore righteous resistance against oppression.

Hamas’s stabbing and shooting civilians and slitting their throats cannot, however, reasonably be described as a justifiable form of fighting repression; nor have such means been widely used historically by national liberation movements.

While Israeli leaders couldn’t possibly have stood passively after the attack, nor are they entitled to retaliate without restraint and with no regard to the distinction between armed combatants and unarmed civilians.

The imperative of discriminating between the two during armed conflicts is central to both international humanitarian law and just war theory because, in the political theorist Michael Walzer’s words, the latter are not “engaged in harm”.

Similarly, depriving all Gazans of the most basic requirements for survival amounts to collective punishment: every man, woman and child suffers, whether or not they are engaged in hostilities in any fashion.

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