Ruwaida Kamal Amer is a journalist in Khan Younis, Gaza. Her mother has a bone and nerve disease and can’t move if she doesn’t have her medication. Every time Amer can find some, she buys as much as she can. But amid the bombing and displacement, it’s become harder and harder to find. Her mother rations the medicine, stretching it out as long as she can. “We hear her groans,” Amer writes in the left-wing Israeli magazine +972, “yet we’re helpless to alleviate her suffering.”

Amer’s situation is painfully easy to imagine. Who doesn’t have an older relative who desperately needs medication? It’s the kind of agonizing story that’s become commonplace across Gaza in the last year.

In a landscape of horror, it’s even relatively mundane. The tiny strip of land has become home to the planet’s largest population of child amputees in a year of relentless bombing. At least 90 percent of the population has been displaced from their homes. As civilians scurry from one side of the twenty-five-mile strip to the other, ordered back and forth by the Israeli military and then often bombed in whatever part they were told was “safe,” it’s become mind-numbingly common for several generations of an entire family to die together.

Israel’s apologists in the West will tell you that everything that’s happened to all of these people is Hamas’s fault. First, they say, Israel’s escalation came in response to the violence of October 7, 2023; nevermind that Hamas’s brutal massacres that day were but one link in a depressingly long chain of atrocities and counteratrocities.

Now, as the Israeli army completes the first full year of its Gaza stampede, destroying hospital after hospital, school after school, mosque after mosque, church after church, apartment block after apartment block, Israel’s apologists will assure you that every single one of these buildings contained a Hamas rocket launcher or ammunition dump.

And as Yemen is bombed, as Lebanon is bombed, as Iran is about to bombed, and as Israeli ground forces strike deeper into Lebanon, they’ll tell you that this is all the fault of the Iranian regime and its allies in Yemen and Lebanon for entering the war on the side of Hamas. (Notice a pattern here: Every action is performed by Hamas. Israel and the United States only react. Their actions are always justified.)

It’s certainly true that Hamas committed grisly and indefensible atrocities on October 7. The standard estimates are that Hamas killed 695 Israeli civilians that day, along with a little over five hundred Israeli soldiers. No noncombatant anywhere deserves to die for the actions of their government. It should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. (If you’re an American citizen who hesitates to accept this principle, ask yourself whether your mother or your best friend would be reasonable targets of retaliation for the US invasion of Iraq.)

At a certain point, however, all parties involved must stop using past bloodshed to justify future bloodshed. Too many lives are at stake to play this game in perpetuity.

Right now, Israel is committing atrocities of its own that can and will be used to justify future acts of violent aggression from its enemies. Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israel’s endless campaign of retaliation. That number balloons to hundreds of thousands when we include indirect deaths caused by the war.

Apologists can tell themselves that Israel doesn’t “intentionally” target civilians, but the sheer numbers tell a different story, especially when combined with the well-documented flood of genocidal rhetoric from top Israeli officials. Just as Israel uses the horror of October 7 as a rationalization and excuse to murder Palestinian civilians, Israel’s own atrocities will be used to justify future attacks on Israel.

If you truly believe that Israel’s actions in the last year are justified by what happened on October 7, I have a very simple question for you. Say the murder of 695 Israeli civilians justified Israel’s assault on Palestinian civilians; what magnitude of violence, by the same logic, would be justified by the expulsion of millions of Palestinians from their homes, the murder of tens of thousands, and the dismemberment of thousands of children? What price in blood would settle accounts after the mass death and suffering that’s been inflicted on Gaza?

If you’re repulsed by the thought of exacting such a price, you certainly should be. But that point cuts in both directions. Last month, during a debate with libertarian economist Walter Block, I told him that it sounded as if his position was that “nothing could ever justify October 7, but October 7 can justify everything.” He looked up and nodded, like, yes, that’s my position. But short of reclassifying Palestinians as a separate species, whose lives are simply less important and therefore less worth avenging, this is incoherent. The first part is correct: nothing could justify killing 695 Israeli civilians on October 7. But the second part is monstrous, implying as it does that Palestinian lives are simply worth less.

The twisted moral logic of slaughtering tens of thousands to avenge hundreds is pulling the region deeper and deeper into a war whose consequences could be unthinkable. It all needs to stop. Not tomorrow. Not in six months or in another year or ten years. Not “when Hamas is destroyed” (spoken without irony by people who saw the United States spend twenty years “destroying the Taliban” in Afghanistan only to leave the Taliban entirely intact) or when Hezbollah and the Houthis agree to a separate peace or in any number of other fantasy scenarios.

The most obvious and salient truth about it is that it could stop tomorrow if the United States stopped providing the bombs and the diplomatic cover Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to continue the war, and thus forced him to agree to a cease-fire in Gaza and beyond. That is what needs to happen now. Not more apologism for violence. Not more retaliation. Not one more eye for an eye. The past is bloodstained, but the future doesn’t have to be.