The Houthis said it would continue to target Red Sea shipping until Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza, and that its forces would respond to the strikes. The Iranian-backed rebel group, which considers Israel its enemy, controls Sanaa and the north-west of Yemen, but it is not the country's internationally recognised government. The Houthis have said they are acting in support of the Palestinians in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and have claimed - often falsely - that they are targeting ships only linked to Israel, the US or the UK.

Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation right now, with fake accounts, straight-up lies, confident-sounding assertions based on old videos, and people who spent 20 minutes Googling about something trying to correct reporters, academics and researchers who have spent years covering Israel, Palestine, and wars of all kinds.

An explosion at a hospital is not unlike the debate that broke out about precisely how many Israeli children were beheaded or burned alive after Hamas’s attack. Journalistically, it is important for us to get this story right. Morally, the finer details are in some ways not the most relevant. This explosion, whether it was the result of an Israeli rocket or not, has still left rescue crews collecting bodies and remains in a charred parking lot. And while everyone was arguing about who to blame this incident on, Israel did bomb a school run by the United Nations, killing six people. And the situation in Gaza is increasingly desperate.

They killed over 1,500 Hamas fighters in the initial battle. They have flattened dozens of buildings in Gaza — including schools, housing, and health centers. At least 19 journalists have been killed, a sign of how wide-reaching the violence has been. Israel has, in all likelihood, killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians — and the number may already be in the thousands. They have displaced one million people. Senior Hamas leaders are being killed left and right. They’re clashing with protesters in the West Bank, where the resulting violence has also killed people. They are rallying support from allies in Europe and the United States.That is the response. A lot of the commentary assumes Israel should pursue a strategy of uprooting and destroying Hamas, which implies that what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. But as the U.S. learned in launching a full-scale attack to destroy al-Qaeda, what follows could well be worse. And as I wrote earlier this week, Israel should be careful not to repeat the same post-9/11 mistakes the U.S. made. Israel’s response has already been violent, and it’s been forceful, and it’s been severe.

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

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.

What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?

Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. Fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.

Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.”

I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.