Mass atrocities are in prologue and most of the world is cheering. 

Within a week, more than 1900 Palestinians have been killed, along with 1300 Israelis. Yet, the prevailing sentiment is that this is just the beginning of another cruel chapter in human history. 

For days, more than 2.2 million Gazans have been facing what the UN is calling an “inescapable risk of starvation,” amounting to a crime against humanity. Now, half of them are also faced with an “impossible to meet” ultimatum to evacuate their homes. 

Over one million civilians have been told by the Israeli government to either go somewhere they do not have access to, or be killed. 

The UN is currently preparing the world for “devastating humanitarian consequences” if Israel does not withdraw its ultimatum. And yet the world is cheering and applauding Israel’s “right to revenge” to what is arguably its biggest loss since 1973. 

Somehow, within all this madness, the main question being asked to Gazans, to Palestinians, or anyone supporting them is whether or not they support Hamas’s recent actions of killing and kidnapping civilians.  

Furthermore, unarmed Gazans are being expected to prove that they do not support the armed group that is currently holding down the ground with them, or get wiped out by a powerful army that has been besieging them in the world’s largest open air prison for years. 

In a different setting but similar manner, journalists on the ground, as well as in-studio commentators, are being held to the same standards as Palestinians and their supporters. Before being asked any other question about the reality on the ground or the devastations that Gazans have faced, they are being challenged to demonstrate where they stand on the issue of the Israeli civilians who were taken hostage and/or killed by Hamas this past week. The answer to this question thus leads to an assessment of their credibility, as well as the value of whatever they say after that. 

As a journalist who has covered the region for more than two decades, I am finding this, in the least to say, exasperating.

This is in no way because I don’t have a very definite and unquestionable position rejecting any violence against any civilian, but rather because many of those doing the asking have barely given any attention to the flagrant killings of Palestinian civilians, which has been going on for as long as I can remember. 

Those doing the asking, reacting so “appropriately” to the killing of Israeli civilians, have never shown a proportional amount of sympathy or enthusiasm standing up for Palestinian civilians being killed, oppressed, and denied of their basic human rights day after day, year after year, and decade after decade. 

Even when a fellow journalist, Shirine Abou Akleh, was killed in cold blood by an Israeli sniper last year, we did not see this kind of energy nor did we hear requests to call her murder what it really was: a war crime, committed by the best equipped army in the world.  

In the past week, more than ten journalists have been killed in Gaza. Across the border, on the Lebanese side, a group of clearly identified journalists including the teams of Al Jazeera, Reuters and AFP was targeted by indiscriminate shelling. 

Six journalists were wounded, one gravely. Another, Reuter’s Issam al Abdallah, killed. He was a friend. 

As I write these lines I closely follow updates on their safety.

The statement issued by Reuters is shameless, as they wrote that Issam was “killed” while he was working. Reading this statement makes one feel like he died in a car accident on his way to cover a story about tobacco planting in South Lebanon. A second statement was eventually issued on October 13, followed by another three days later, in which Reuters’ Editor-in-Chief Allesandra Galloni asked the Israelis for a “swift, thorough and transparent investigation into the killing.”

The international wires agency hasn’t requested an investigation in what could possibly be an Israeli war crime that targeted one of its own. 

What does that tell us about the rest of the coverage and the safety of the press moving forward?

Is it because he was killed on the wrong side of the conflict that his death is less of a crime? 

I am finding it absurd that in such times, those of us whose lives have been shaped by this situation are being questioned and requested to take sides.   

I know that most foreign correspondents, just like most human rights workers or even diplomats who know our region, share my frustrations when they are asked to simplify matters  and to choose between their sympathy towards Israeli civilians killed by Hamas in the past week, or Palestinians killed by the Israeli authorities for more than seven decades. 

As a journalist, I find this painfully insulting.

I don’t feel like I owe any answer or justification to anyone. 

If today, I give a clear position on where I stand, it is because I owe it to my unborn grandchildren so they don’t have to live with the guilt of not knowing what my position was when a big massacre was about to be committed. 

I can’t speak on the behalf of any Gazan or Palestinian.

But, I can speak for myself as a Lebanese who never stopped believing in the right of the Palestinian people to defend their land, their history, their culture, their identity, and their memory. 

I speak as a Lebanese citizen who over the years went from admiring the concept of “resistance,” to disliking Hizbullah for political and sometimes cultural reasons, to fighting it after realizing how much of a tool for Iran it is, and how far Iran would go in its proxy wars, destroying other people’s countries and killing their civilians for its own political gain. 

I speak as the journalist, who in 2006,  covered another Israeli war side by side with the late Anthony Shadid, then bureau chief of The Washington Post, also a friend and one of the best journalists of our times. I could only imagine what Anthony would say if his humanity was being challenged by some TV anchor in a random, cold newsroom, too far from the spilled blood to smell it, or by some young social media sensation, too young to know what war means. 

In 2006, I was live on air, as, behind me, the bodies of children were being pulled from under the rubble of their houses, which were bombed during Qana’s second massacre.  

I was on the ground, with Hizbullah fighters not too far off, as they moved around civilians using them as human shields. Yet, it was Israel doing the bombing. It was Israel killing civilians, young and old, children and babies. When the war ended 33 days later, Lebanon’s infrastructure had sustained immense damage: Entire areas were in ruins and reduced to rubble, more than 1000 people had been killed, over a million had been displaced, tens of thousands had lost their houses, and still, Hizbullah was celebrating what it called its “Divine Victory.”

Ever since, Hizbullah has had the upper hand in Lebanon, controlling parliament, forming governments, electing presidents, and blocking the work of every political institution in the country, notwithstanding the assassination of those who oppose it, be it politicians, activists, and journalists, including personal friends. 

So please, enough with the lecturing. 

If Israel attacks Lebanon again, which is increasingly seeming as a possibility, will I have to answer whether I support Hizbullah, before I find myself paying the price of another Israeli attack? 

Will it make a difference if I say I don’t? 

Will my talking about my losses in fighting Hizbullah mean anything? 

Will any of that stop Israel from bombing south Lebanon? Or from bombing the airport? Or the bridges? Or Beirut? Or even my neighborhood? 

Will my voice be heard? Will my voice matter?

Can the voice of Gazans under siege today be heard? Can the voice of 2.2 million Gazans be heard? Can anyone say they know for a fact that Gazans support Hamas and that, because of this, Israel has a green light to kill them? 

Is a potential “genocide” not condemnable unless it happens? Is it not avoidable? 

No matter what the coming days or weeks bring, no matter how long any war lasts, eventually, there will be a political solution that can only be reached around a negotiation table. 

Isn’t it possible to take a shortcut that would save humanity the cost of another unforgivable crime?

The polarization we are seeing today is deafening, and the appetite for revenge on both sides is mounting, but as irrelevant as it might sound today, peace is the only option worth fighting for. 

And before anyone asks, yes, peace is an option.  

A fair and just peace based on a two states solution and the dismantling of the settlements is not impossible to achieve. It can give both Palestinians and Israelis justice and safety that no amount of normalization with any Arab country could ever guarantee. 

The most complicated conflict in recent history is really not that complicated. 

Palestinians are not giving up on Palestine. They are not giving up their land – the land of their fathers and grandfathers, and great grandfathers. They still hold the keys to the houses that have long been replaced. 

They still talk about the olive groves and repeat the stories that their ancestors told them. 

How can we blame people for that? 

And if we do, can we ever again believe in standing up for justice?

An earlier version of this article didn’t include Reuter’s second and third statements which were not yet communicated at the time of publication.