A Palestinian child is killed in Gaza.
For almost everyone looking at the image, the first reaction is the same: this is terrible.
Then comes the question that divides people almost instantly.
Who is to blame?
For many critics of Israel, the answer appears straightforward. An Israeli bomb fell. A Palestinian civilian died. Israel therefore bears responsibility.
For many Israelis, the moral calculation begins somewhere else.
Hamas launched the October 7 attack, deliberately killed civilians, took hostages into Gaza and continued fighting from a densely populated territory. Israel, in this view, did not choose the circumstances in which the war began. It was confronted with an armed organization that had attacked its population and remained embedded among Palestinian civilians.
The Israeli weapon may have caused a particular death. But does that automatically mean Israel deserves the primary moral blame for it?
That question, more than almost any other, helps explain why Israelis and their critics can look at the same war and see almost entirely different realities.
Causing something is not the same as being morally responsible for it
This distinction is not an Israeli invention.
It is a longstanding problem in moral philosophy.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes between causal responsibility and moral responsibility. A person can be part of the causal chain that produces an outcome without automatically being morally blameworthy for that outcome.
The reason is simple: moral judgment normally requires more information.
What did the person intend?
What did they know?
What alternatives did they have?
Was the consequence foreseeable?
Did they create the danger themselves, or were they responding to a danger created by someone else?
Did they act recklessly?
Did they take reasonable precautions?
Those questions matter because identical outcomes can carry radically different moral meanings.
Consider the difference between deliberately killing a civilian and unintentionally killing a civilian while trying to stop an armed attacker.
The civilian is dead in both cases.
The physical result is identical.
The moral act is not.
This principle appears in the doctrine of double effect, an old idea in moral philosophy and just-war theory. It holds, in simplified terms, that foreseeing a harmful consequence is morally different from intending that consequence as the means or purpose of an action.
But there is an equally important qualification.
Not intending civilian deaths does not automatically make them morally acceptable.
A person can act recklessly. A military can use excessive force. A commander can ignore a safer alternative. An attack can impose an unjustifiable risk on civilians even when nobody wanted those civilians to die.
That distinction is central to understanding Gaza.
“Israel did not deliberately target these civilians” and “Israel bears no responsibility for their deaths” are not the same claim.
Who created the danger?
The second question concerns where the chain of responsibility begins.
Philosopher Jeff McMahan has argued that responsibility in war can depend heavily on who created or contributed to an unjust threat.
That matters because the person who performs the final physical act is not always the person who bears the greatest moral responsibility for the outcome.
Imagine an armed man takes civilians hostage.
Police arrive.
During an attempt to stop him, a police bullet accidentally kills one of the hostages.
Who caused the hostage’s death?
The police officer, in the immediate physical sense.
But who deserves the blame?
Most people would want to know much more before answering.
Did the police act reasonably? Was there another way to stop the attacker? Did the gunman deliberately use the hostage as a shield? Did the officer fire recklessly? Was the hostage’s death virtually certain?
If the police acted carefully and had no realistic alternative, much of the moral blame would normally remain with the gunman who created the lethal situation.
If the police fired indiscriminately when safer options existed, responsibility would begin shifting back toward them.
The analogy is imperfect. Gaza is not a five-minute hostage standoff. It is a prolonged war across a densely populated territory involving thousands of military decisions.
But the underlying moral structure is useful.
The actor who creates a dangerous situation can remain morally responsible for foreseeable consequences caused by someone responding to it. At the same time, the responding actor remains responsible for how it responds.
October 7 matters to the blame question
Any moral analysis of the Gaza war that begins with Palestinian casualties while treating October 7 as background noise has already made a choice about where the chain of responsibility begins.
Hamas-led forces attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and taking hostages into Gaza.
Amnesty International, an organization highly critical of Israeli conduct in Gaza, later concluded that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the attack and in their treatment of hostages.
A particularly revealing statement came weeks afterward from senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad.
Speaking on Lebanese television, Hamad said Hamas intended to repeat October 7 and acknowledged that Palestinians would “pay a price,” while insisting that Hamas should not be blamed for what it did.
That statement matters because foreseeability is important to moral responsibility.
If Hamas’s leadership understood that October 7 would provoke a major Israeli military response, and nevertheless chose to launch the attack, its responsibility cannot reasonably end when the Israeli response begins.
That does not settle responsibility for everything that happened afterward.
But it makes it much harder to treat Hamas simply as a passive background condition.
It is an actor with agency.
The battlefield matters too
The same principle applies to where and how Hamas fights.
There is substantial evidence that Hamas has operated military infrastructure within Gaza’s civilian environment, although individual Israeli claims have varied greatly in how well they were independently substantiated.
Al-Shifa Hospital is a good example of why precision matters.
There was evidence of Hamas military use of the complex, including tunnels beneath it and the movement of hostages through the hospital. But some of Israel’s strongest initial claims about a major command center were not fully demonstrated by the evidence publicly released.
That distinction matters.
It would be misleading to claim that every Israeli assertion about Hamas operating from civilian infrastructure has been proven.
It would be equally misleading to pretend the broader phenomenon does not exist.
For Israelis, this dramatically changes the blame calculation.
If an armed group builds military infrastructure within civilian neighborhoods, holds hostages in civilian environments or deliberately fights from places where civilians are present, then civilian risk is partly produced by those decisions.
Again, that does not give Israel permission to attack without restraint.
It means the moral responsibility for the resulting danger cannot be assigned simply by looking at whose bomb eventually explodes.
Where responsibility returns to Israel
This is where the argument often becomes too simplistic.
“Hamas started the war” cannot morally mean “Israel is therefore incapable of doing anything wrong.”
Traditional just-war theorist Michael Walzer separates two questions.
Was going to war justified?
And was the war fought justly?
A party can be right on the first question and wrong on the second.
That distinction is crucial.
Hamas can bear enormous responsibility for starting the war, murdering civilians and creating battlefield conditions that expose Palestinians to danger.
Israel can simultaneously remain responsible for every decision it makes about targets, weapons, precautions and acceptable civilian risk.
These statements do not contradict each other.
They describe different layers of responsibility.
The killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab illustrates why this matters.
In August 2026, the Israeli military acknowledged that its forces had fired on the car in which Rajab and members of her family were killed and announced a criminal investigation.
That case cannot simply be answered with “Hamas started the war.”
If soldiers acted wrongfully in a particular incident, the original cause of the broader war does not erase their responsibility.
The same applies to allegations involving aid workers, emergency personnel and individual military operations.
Each case has to be judged on its own facts.
This is why the most defensible Israeli argument is not:
Hamas is responsible for every Palestinian death.
It is:
Hamas bears substantial responsibility for creating and sustaining a war in which Palestinian civilians are placed in extreme danger, while Israel remains responsible for whether its own military conduct is proportionate, careful and justified.
Why the same death produces opposite conclusions
The difference is not only philosophical.
It is psychological.
Research on outcome bias has repeatedly shown that people judge the same decision more harshly when it produces a terrible result, even when the information available to the decision-maker was identical.
A military commander orders a strike.
In one version, the target is hit and no civilians die.
In another, the same decision based on the same intelligence unexpectedly kills a family.
People tend to judge the second decision more harshly simply because they know the outcome.
Hindsight bias compounds the problem.
Once something terrible has happened, the warning signs that preceded it often appear much more obvious than they actually were beforehand.
Psychologist Mark Alicke’s “culpable control” model goes further. People do not always calmly establish causation and then assign blame. Negative emotional reactions to an actor can shape how much causal responsibility people believe that actor had in the first place.
That is particularly relevant to a war experienced through images.
Destroyed apartment blocks are visible.
A dead child is visible.
The Israeli aircraft or artillery responsible can often be identified.
What is less visible is the chain of earlier decisions that produced the battlefield: an attack launched months earlier, a tunnel dug under a neighborhood, a weapons cache placed inside a civilian structure, a hostage held nearby or a military unit deciding to operate from a populated area.
There is no single psychological study proving that this exact process explains reactions to Gaza, and our research cautions against pretending otherwise.
But several established psychological effects point in that direction.
What is immediate, emotional and visible can dominate judgments of responsibility.
Israelis and Palestinians really do assign blame differently
This is not merely theoretical.
Polling shows markedly different patterns.
In an October 2025 survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 54 percent of Palestinians blamed Israel for Gazans’ suffering, compared with 14 percent who blamed Hamas.
Among Gazans themselves, 21 percent blamed Hamas.
American public opinion is more complicated.
A 2024 AP-NORC/Pearson survey found 76 percent of Americans considered Hamas at least somewhat responsible for the continuation of the fighting, while 75 percent said the same of the Israeli government.
That does not mean Americans believed the two sides were equally responsible. The question allowed respondents to place responsibility on multiple actors.
But it demonstrates something important: people are capable of assigning responsibility simultaneously rather than treating blame as a prize that only one side can possess.
Perhaps the most interesting evidence comes from American Jews.
A 2025 Washington Post/Ipsos survey, as reported by multiple outlets, found that a majority blamed Hamas more for civilian deaths while substantial shares simultaneously said Israel had committed war crimes, and 39 percent said Israel had committed genocide.
Whatever one thinks of those legal judgments, the polling demonstrates something philosophically important.
A person can believe Israel has acted wrongly and still believe Hamas bears greater responsibility for Palestinian deaths.
Those are separate judgments.
Blame is built into much anti-Israel activism
This disagreement matters because political movements require a theory of who is responsible for the injustice they are fighting.
Contemporary anti-Israel activism is no exception.
The original BDS movement’s framing identifies Israeli treatment of Palestinians as the central source of injustice and describes Israel through an oppressor-versus-oppressed framework.
Jewish Voice for Peace illustrates how this language has developed during the Gaza war.
Immediately after October 7, JVP condemned Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians as a war crime while simultaneously accusing Israel of launching a “genocidal war.”
By May 2024, a JVP statement placed responsibility for the Palestinian death toll, siege and destruction on Israel and the United States without mentioning Hamas in that particular statement.
By July 2025, the organization accused Israel of “manufacturing a famine” and using starvation as a tool of genocide.
The point is not that every pro-Palestinian activist believes exactly the same thing.
They do not.
Nor is blaming Israel the only foundation of anti-Israel activism. Opposition to Zionism, settlements, occupation, Palestinian displacement, refugee claims and the settler-colonial interpretation of Israel all have histories independent of the current Gaza casualty toll.
But blame for Palestinian suffering is clearly one of the movement’s central moral engines.
That makes sense.
Political outrage requires more than tragedy.
It requires a culprit.
If Palestinian suffering is primarily understood as something Israel is doing to Palestinians, then demonstrations against Israel, boycotts, sanctions and accusations of criminality follow logically from that moral framework.
If the same suffering is understood instead as a tragic consequence of a war Hamas initiated and deliberately continues to fight from within Palestinian society, the political conclusion looks very different.
The oppressor-versus-oppressed framework changes the starting point
Many activists interpret the conflict through the language of colonizer and colonized, occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed.
Within that framework, Israel’s superior military and political power is not merely another fact.
It is central to the moral analysis.
If Israel is understood as the dominant power that created the underlying political structure, then Palestinian violence can be interpreted primarily as a consequence of that structure rather than as an independent source of moral responsibility.
Some solidarity statements analyzed by scholars have gone remarkably far in this direction, attributing the root cause of violence entirely to Israeli occupation and oppression while omitting the Israeli civilians killed on October 7.
The strongest version of this argument should not be dismissed casually.
Greater power often means more options.
More options can mean greater responsibility for choosing the least harmful one.
Israel has aircraft, intelligence capabilities, precision weapons and a functioning state apparatus that Hamas does not possess. Critics therefore argue that Israel’s superior ability to shape the battlefield gives it a correspondingly greater obligation to protect civilians.
But there is a problem if power becomes the only measure of moral agency.
Hamas does not cease being a moral actor because Israel is stronger.
A weaker actor can still choose to massacre civilians.
It can still take hostages.
It can still choose where to store weapons or conduct military operations.
It can still foresee consequences.
Treating Palestinians as human beings deserving protection should not require treating the organizations governing or fighting among them as incapable of morally consequential choices.
Blame does not have to add up to 100 percent
Perhaps the biggest mistake in the entire debate is imagining that responsibility has to belong entirely to one side.
It does not.
Imagine three different Palestinian civilian deaths.
In the first, Hamas establishes a military position inside a civilian building. Israel identifies the position, determines that the target is militarily important, takes reasonable precautions and conducts an attack in which a civilian nevertheless dies.
A person may reasonably assign substantial responsibility to Hamas for creating that situation while regarding the civilian’s death as a tragic but unintended consequence of legitimate defensive action.
In the second case, the military target is real, but Israeli commanders choose an unnecessarily destructive method when a safer option was realistically available.
Responsibility becomes more shared.
In the third, soldiers fire on civilians without adequate justification.
The fact that Hamas started the larger war does very little to excuse what happened in that particular incident.
The war does not have one moral answer.
It contains thousands of individual decisions.
The argument is really about where the story begins
This may be the most important point.
When an Israeli critic looks at Gaza and asks who is responsible, the moral story may begin with an Israeli bomb striking a Palestinian home.
When an Israeli looks at the same event, the story may begin months earlier with October 7, or with Hamas choosing to operate from within civilian Gaza.
Go further back and the disagreement expands again.
A Palestinian activist may begin the story in 1967.
Or 1948.
Or with Zionism itself.
An Israeli may begin with decades of rejectionism, terrorism and wars against the Jewish state.
Once people choose different starting points, they can agree on a surprising number of individual facts while still reaching completely opposite conclusions.
That is because facts do not assign their own moral meaning.
People place them inside a story of agency, intention and responsibility.
The question beneath almost every other question
None of this makes Palestinian civilian suffering less real.
A dead child is not less dead because Hamas bears responsibility for creating the battlefield.
Nor does recognizing Israeli mistakes require concluding that Israel had no right to fight Hamas after October 7.
The harder position is to hold both truths at once.
Hamas can bear enormous responsibility for beginning the war, deliberately murdering civilians, taking hostages and exposing Palestinians to the foreseeable consequences of a war fought from within their society.
Israel can still be responsible for every unnecessary, reckless or wrongful act committed while responding to that threat.
That is not moral equivalence.
It is moral accounting.
And it explains why the argument over Gaza is so difficult to resolve.
The dispute is not simply about how many Palestinians have died.
It is not simply about whether Hamas fights among civilians.
It is not even simply about whether a particular Israeli strike was lawful.
Beneath all of those arguments sits a more fundamental question:
When tragedy occurs, whose choices made that tragedy morally theirs?
Until Israelis and their critics recognize that they are answering that question according to radically different theories of blame, they will continue looking at the same deaths, feeling the same horror and accusing completely different people.
