Infrequently Asked Questions: Amid Misery in Gaza, Some Things Don't Compute -- Part 1

That Gazans subsist in misery is indisputable, and Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent decision to dispute it is incomprehensible. It's dishonest, and it undermines Israel's government's credibility. Those who maintain that Israel, despite the impossible position in which Hamas' genocidal invasion has put it, must nevertheless do all it reasonably can to minimize the war's misery are right to do so.

But the tsunami of oh-so-confident criticism leveled at Israel begs the question: Where are the questions? Reflexive, long fashionable anti-Israelism is a given, and horror at the suffering of innocents who are now dying by the thousands is understandable.

However, there are obvious questions that aren't being asked, too many to fit in a single column.

Here's a start.

Every day, the media dutifully cites claims made by something called the "Gaza Health Ministry," which by definition is the "Hamas Health Ministry." These include claims about who and how many have died, who the combatants were and who the civilians, what the actual circumstances were, what supposed "witnesses" said about the events, and the like.

But has anyone stopped to ask whether a Hamas Health Ministry actually exists, and what it could possibly consist of, given that Hamas functionaries are underground, not just figuratively but literally? Is there an office of any such thing? Where might that be? Are there employees? Record keepers? Records? What in the world is this entity that everyone keeps citing?

Placing entirely to one side that Hamas' two principal industries are murder and propaganda, journalists once imagined to be trained to be skeptical but nowadays required to sell stories seem curiously incurious about how a "ministry" whose personnel are hiding in tunnels could plausibly be relied upon to collect and report data about anything, let alone this war. Forget about the fact that anyone in Gaza who doesn't say what Hamas tells them to say risks their lives.

Here's something else to think about.

Gazans have lived in squalor for generations. When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007, it famously destroyed industrial sized, food-producing greenhouses that Israel had created and left there, rather than permit Gazans to use the greenhouses to grow badly needed food.

Hamas also took billions of dollars in what was supposed to be humanitarian aid for Gaza and did two things. It built an elaborate underground war machine to launch attacks against Israeli civilians. And it ripped the money off for itself. Put it this way: Hamas leaders living in luxury in Qatar did not amass their personal billions by working construction, depositing weekly paychecks and waiting for interest to compound. And while Gaza has been miserably poor forever, its plight has worsened considerably since Hamas took it over and consigned Gazans to the wretched conditions in which they find themselves. As Sky News economic analyst Ed Conway wrote in October 2023: "Gaza was already desperately poor before Hamas won its election and seized power. It has become significantly poorer, and significantly more desperate, in the years since."

Why do we suppose Hamas, having embedded its gunmen under civilians' houses and in mosques, hospitals and community centers, and knowing that Israel would certainly launch a blistering military response to Hamas' attack, send thousands of men into Israel to slaughter Israelis, guaranteeing the deaths of thousands of Gazans?

Here's a big one.

What, precisely, was Israel's choice on Oct. 8? To ask the U.N. to pass a resolution expressing "concern"? Performer and performative Israel critic Jon Stewart's got an important job, telling jokes principally written by others. But what does he advise Israel should have done in response to the slaughter of 1,200 civilians and the kidnapping of 250 more?

Couple others.

It's an article of faith that the American-Israeli food distribution enterprise called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is evil incarnate, a nefarious undertaking that just shows how determined Israel is to starve Gazans. But since it started distributing aid in May, it has delivered approximately 100 million meals, while the U.N. has sat on the sidelines letting untold tons of food rot in the Gazan sun. Isn't it a tad odd that Hamas has as one of its principal demands that GHF cease distributing food to Gazans? Isn't it also odd that the U.N. would fold its hands and decline to distribute food while accusing Israel of being responsible for hunger that the U.N. could at least ease?

These are puzzlers, no question about it. And there are plenty more questions where those came from.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.