Opinion | In the Israel-Gaza War, We Must Not Kill Some Children to Protect Others | Hamas Fails to Make Case That Israel Struck Hospital | The Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza | Social-media influencers are battling to educate young Indians about sex

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Opinion | In the Israel-Gaza War, We Must Not Kill Some Children to Protect Others - The New York Times

The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy. And in this test, we in the West are not doing well.

The acceptance of large-scale bombing of Gaza and of a ground invasion likely to begin soon suggests that Palestinian children are lesser victims, devalued by their association with Hamas and its history of terrorism. Consider that more than 1,500 children in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, and around one-third of Gaza homes have been destroyed or damaged in just two weeks — and this is merely the softening-up before what is expected to be a much bloodier ground invasion.

I’ve flown into beautiful, sun-washed Tel Aviv, where the graffiti reads “Destroy Hamas.” Israelis have been shattered by the Hamas terrorism and kidnappings, an attack that felt existential and explains the determination to dismantle Hamas, whatever the cost. The anxiety in Tel Aviv is palpable, peaceful though it seems, while Gaza is an inner ring of hell and probably on a path to something much worse.

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Hamas Fails to Make Case That Israel Struck Hospital - The New York Times

A senior Hamas official says “nothing is left” of the munition that hit the Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City last week, killing hundreds. Israel says the explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket.

Five days after Hamas accused Israel of bombing a hospital in Gaza City and killing hundreds of people, the armed Palestinian group has yet to produce or describe any evidence linking Israel to the strike, says it cannot find the munition that hit the site and has declined to provide detail to support its count of the casualties.

Within an hour of the blast on Tuesday night, the Hamas-run Gazan health ministry accused Israel of attacking the Ahli Arab hospital, a medical center in Gaza City where scores of families had been sheltering. The allegation was soon denied by Israel but quickly accepted and amplified by Arab leaders across the Middle East, setting off unrest throughout the region. The claim was widely cited by international news outlets, including The New York Times, before Israel issued its denial.

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The Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza - The New Yorker

On Friday, Israel began warning more than a million Palestinians who live in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate their homes. It did so while continuing its bombing campaign, which it says is meant to destroy Hamas, the terrorist group that brutally murdered over thirteen hundred Israelis last weekend. The United Nations has said that a relocation of so many civilians from such a densely populated area is “impossible”; already, more than twenty-four hundred Palestinians have been killed. To help understand the situation in Gaza, I recently spoke by phone with Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. She also co-founded the organization Gisha, which works on human-rights issues in Gaza, and she is currently in the West Bank. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed her specific concerns about Israel’s military action, the challenges of evacuating Gaza, and how human-rights advocates wrestle with different types of atrocities.

This is not the first Israeli incursion into Gaza since Hamas took control of the territory, in 2007. What human-rights norms has Israel observed and not observed in prior incursions?

In prior incursions, the Israeli military engaged in disproportionate and in some cases indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The laws of war require armies to avoid deliberately targeting civilians, and also to avoid attacks that by their nature cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants. In particular, in Gaza, because it’s such a densely populated urban area, when you fire explosive weapons on a massive scale, it’s predictable that civilians will die. It’s predictable that children will die. And that’s what has happened certainly in the last couple of days, but also in most of the rounds of violence that have taken place over the last many years.

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Social-media influencers are battling to educate young Indians about sex - The Economist

THIS WEEK marks the start of Navratri, a Hindu festival spanning nine nights that honours the goddess Durga. In western India, men and women celebrants will re-enact the fight between good and evil by clanking wooden sticks and swaying in circles together to loud music. Some go further. Navratri’s emphasis upon heady mingling between the sexes has long been associated with free love. The Hindu nationalist government of Gujarat once attributed a rise in abortions in the state to the festival. Condom sales are reported to soar ahead of it.

“We stock up a few weeks beforehand and sell 30-40% more than usual during Navratri”, says Mahendra Kumavat of K&S Pharmacy in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad. The growing scale of the festivities, as India gets richer, is creating opportunities for surreptitious coupling. Reduced family sizes have meanwhile made parents less able to rely on one of their offspring to police libidinous teens. Some go so far as to hire detectives instead. “On two occasions we do great business: one is Valentine’s Day and another is Navratri”, says Lalit Raval, a former air force officer, who runs a private detective agency in Gujarat.

Some condom sellers are seizing the opportunity. In 2021 Nykaa, an e-commerce outfit, slashed prices of condoms and lubes as part of a “Navratri sale”. A few years earlier Manforce, an Indian condom maker, ran hoardings featuring a former porn star called Sunny Leone with the slogan, “This Navratri, play, but with love”. The signs were castigated by Hindu activist groups and taken down.

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