Hamas, a holy enemy, and the Israeli attacks on civilians: Amalekites are merciful and violent to the ultimate victim that Israel will grow up and kill

One reason I’m afraid that the worst is yet to come in the Middle East is that the mutual dehumanization is the most savage I’ve ever seen it in decades of on-the-ground reporting in the region.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza is destroying tunnels, ammunition dumps and Hamas fighters, yes. But I’m afraid it’s also helping to pulverize the recognition of shared humanity that in the long run allows people to live beside one another in peace. The poisonous hatred in turn is already spilling over to the United States and other countries worldwide.

I was thinking about this as I was travelling to meet some people who were stopped in East Jerusalem because of restrictions on visiting Israel. My taxi driver was refused entry into the Palestinian neighborhood by the Israelis and abandoned me on the side of the road to get a Palestinian taxi. I was interviewing a nice 57-year-old Gazan woman who approved of the attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas when I got to my destination.

I was pretty much broken up by that conversation. Such bigotry is nurtured by Hamas propaganda but also by Israeli bombing of Gaza: The woman said she had lost two cousins to Israeli fire, including a young woman married only a year ago, and she weeps daily at the bombardment of family and friends in Gaza.

Meanwhile, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the escalation of the ground operation on Saturday, he cited biblical references to the Amalekites, who were the target of a divine genocide. The story said that God ordered the death of men and women and children. Netanyahu wasn’t advocating that literal policy, but Amalek is a code word that regularly crops up in Israeli politics for a ruthless enemy that must be crushed without mercy.

“You may think you’re being merciful” by sparing a child, counsels a far-right rabbi in a chilling video posted online, but actually “you’re being vicious to the ultimate victim that this child will grow up and kill.” This is also bad for my heart.

There are of course many other voices that are merciful and sensible, and I’ve highlighted them previously. But when children on both sides are slaughtered and people are fearful, it is extremists who invariably are ascendant.

“Extremists need each other, support each other,” Eyad al-Sarraj, a Gaza psychiatrist who died in 2013, once lamented to me. He complained that Israel’s blockade of Gaza since 2007 had turned Hamas fanatics into popular heroes.

Israel’s airstrike killed a member of the Hamas militia in the Falluja neighborhood of Jabaliya

Videos verified by The New York Times captured the aftermath of an airstrike on Wednesday in the Falluja neighborhood of Jabaliya approximately half a mile from the site of Tuesday’s strike. The destruction shown is of similar magnitude, with several large buildings completely flattened. The residents and rescuers can be seen digging through the rubble, carrying the dead and injured people.

Then came the airstrike. The Hamas leader was killed, the military said, and that it had hit a network of Hamas tunnels below the residential area.

Ms. Hammad’s last WhatsApp messages to her cousin Ahmed, 31, who had told her he was hosting dozens of people in a four-bedroom apartment, went unread.

According to Sousan Hammad, a writer and teacher in Brooklyn, she had spent a long time trying to reach her family in Jabaliya. In the last couple of days she has been able to stay in contact with her father in Gaza and send him messages to his family in the United States.

Mr. Hammash said the continued communications problems were adding to the anguish of living despite being deprived and dead.

“This is getting more insane every day,” Yousef Hammash, an employee of the Norwegian Refugee Council who was born in the Jabaliya neighborhood hit by the airstrike, said Wednesday.

Sometimes, the phones rang and didn’t answer. Other times, callers were greeted with a somber recorded message: “Contact with the beloved Gaza Strip was lost as a result of the ongoing aggression,” a voice said. God, may you protect the people of Gaza.

A small boy is crying in a video that is meant to convey the horrors of the war between Israel and Hamas. Clinging to the sandwich he was eating when an airstrike razed his family’s home, he sobs for his two teenage sisters lost amid the chaos, one of whom would later be confirmed dead.

A decade before Israel launched its bombing campaign in Gaza, the boy’s cries were heard hundreds of miles away in Syria.

As Israel sends its troops farther into Gaza, vowing to eradicate Hamas in retaliation for a brazen assault in early October that massacred more than 1,400 people, videos and photographs of the conflict offer a powerful record of the costs of war. But online, those accounts are competing with misappropriated depictions of unrelated tragedies — a cycle that experts say not only diminishes the experiences of victims past and present but also risks casting doubt on legitimate evidence of atrocities from the war. Photographs and clips taken out of context are a common form of misinformation, but experts say their misuse to relay the extent of suffering is particularly egregious.

The executive Director of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University asked, can you imagine a world where violence against a loved one is treated differently than violence against someone else? It is horrifying.