A 74-year-old Canadian woman named Vivian Silver exemplifies the futility of calling for peace in Gaza. A prominent peace activist living in a kibbutz near the Gaza frontier, she had been a board member of B’Tselem, a Israeli organization lobbying for Palestinian rights. On October 7, Hamas terrorists kidnapped her. She has not been heard from since.

Ms Silver worked for and with Palestinians. Her good intentions did her no good. Along with the 1300 Israelis, old and young, who were slaughtered in the attack, she became a casualty of a vicious war.

Supporters of both sides are passionate and blinkered. They overlook competing arguments. They ridicule objections. There is only black and white, good and evil.  

But the issues behind this war are devilishly complex. It is folly to give uncritical support to either side.

Here are some suggestions on how to read the media in a time of moral anguish.

In war truth is the first casualty. This is a cliché, but it cannot be emphasized too often. The terrible facts are terrible enough without embellishing them with ghoulish allegations. The widely circulated claim that Israeli babies had been beheaded may be true, but it remains unproven.

In the era of social media, mobile phone cameras, and 24/7 reporting, outright lies are not the problem. More important is bias: reading only analysis which confirm our preconceived ideas or supercharges our anger. Believe it or not, both sides have plausible narratives. Try to read widely to understand which is more factual.

Don’t demonise. The savagery of the Hamas terrorists was demonic. But demonizing opponents will justify horrific crimes in revenge. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” said Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

And President Isaac Herzog told a press conference that all civilians were combatants in the war. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”

Perhaps these words were uttered under pressure, but they are appalling. About 42 percent of Gazans are under 14 years old. They weren’t even alive when Hamas took over. And Hamas runs a vicious, thuggish dictatorship which tortures and kills its own people. How could Gazans throw off its yoke?  

As American defence analyst Ryan Evans tweeted: “I support Israel's right to exist and to defend itself and its people, but my support does not extend to constructs that can justify war crimes.”

Only just wars deserve to be supported. Israel’s agony is excruciating. It lost 1,300 citizens on October 7. In proportion to their population, that would be 45,000 Americans or 3,600 Australians. But in a civilized world, one injustice cannot excuse another. The requirements for a just war, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, are that

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The first of these conditions is clearly satisfied. The attack by Hamas is an existential threat to Israel. It holds hostages and continues to shell Tel Aviv. But how about the other conditions?

Are there any other avenues? Is it possible to negotiate through Qatar? Turkey? China? The Vatican?

Will Israel’s impending invasion be successful? That depends upon what “success” looks like. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has vowed that Hamas will be destroyed. Ehud Barak, a former commander of Israel Defence Forces, a former defence minister, and a former prime minister, is sceptical. “What does it even mean?” he says. “That no one can still breathe and believe in Hamas’s ideology? That’s not a believable war aim. Israel’s objective now has to be clearer. It has to be that Hamas will be denied its Daesh-like [ISIS-like] military capabilities.”

Will it produce even more serious evils than 1,300 Israeli dead? Quite possibly. The latest death count is 2,750 killed by Israeli air strikes. When the invasion begins, the number of Palestinian deaths could be astronomical.

The questions raised by these four conditions have to be answered.