When over one hundred Palestinians were killed last Thursday during a chaotic effort to send a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian assistance into northern Gaza, it was perhaps the most dispiriting episode to take place since Hamas’ October 7 attack on southern Israel. It was dispiriting because of the horrendous loss of life. It was dispiriting because it happened in the course of an effort to alleviate human suffering in Gaza. And it was dispiriting because the immediate result was a furious argument over what was the precise cause of death for the Palestinians who lost their lives: were they shot by the IDF, shot by Hamas, run over by trucks, or trampled in the mob? After the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history and the deadliest Israeli military operation in Palestinians’ history, we are expending furious energy figuring out who is most at fault for this particular tragedy in a sea of general tragedy rather than doing what must be done to ensure that it does not happen again.

I have no concrete idea what actually happened last Thursday, and neither do you. There is selectively edited Israeli drone footage, selectively edited al-Jazeera video from hundreds of yards away, eyewitness accounts that have the same level of unreliability as eyewitness accounts generally do in stressful situations, and competing claims from both sides, all purporting to definitively tell us what happened when thousands of people descended on tens of trucks in a warzone before dawn. But without seeing one second of footage or listening to one second of reporting, I can venture a decent guess based on simply knowing how human beings work. A huge crowd of starving people rushed to secure whatever they could for themselves and their families when they saw desperately needed supplies on trucks, since that is what any of us would do in that situation. Nervous, mandatorily conscripted soldiers in their early twenties who are not trained to control or confront a mob of desperate civilians rushing toward them panicked and fired their guns, perhaps some in the air as a warning and perhaps some toward the people in self-defense. Truck drivers, who have heard stories about drivers being pulled out of the cabs of their trucks and beaten when carrying in humanitarian assistance, also panicked and tried to drive away as fast as they could in order to save their own lives, irrespective of who was in their way. Throw in Israeli tanks on the outskirts of this convoy ostensibly charged with protecting them, and Hamas fighters with their own guns trying to divert the assistance for themselves, and you introduce a whole new layer of chaos and violence into an already chaotic and violent situation. If you believe that all of the casualties were killed by Israeli bullets, or that none of the casualties were killed by Israeli bullets, I begrudgingly admire your certainty while also being confident that you don’t particularly care what the actual story is.

And yet, the actual story doesn’t really matter anyway. Everyone here is at fault. Israel had no choice but to respond militarily to Hamas’ October 7 massacre and its continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages, and that justified response was inevitably going to result in innocent Palestinian deaths and destruction in Gaza. But Israeli officials continuously downplayed the level of humanitarian disaster, claimed that Palestinians in Gaza had plenty of supplies to survive, and did little for months to make it easier to get assistance directly into northern Gaza or to transport it from southern Gaza to the north. Additionally, they refused to plan for who would fill the vacuum left behind by Israel’s military campaign, made no provisions to provide basic law and order and prevent anarchy, and put up roadblocks in all sorts of ways that made a successful humanitarian relief effort immensely difficult. The U.S. is now airdropping food into Gaza, which is the most expensive and inefficient way to get supplies into a territory and is generally reserved for helping civilians behind enemy lines in implacably hostile situations, and not what is supposed to happen when you want to operate in a territory controlled by your closest partner in the region. Whether or not the IDF killed Palestinians last Thursday morning is irrelevant, because Israeli decisions have led to an environment in which what happened was inevitable. Israel did not ask for October 7 and the subsequent war, but life is not fair; Israel is not relieved of the responsibility it had and continues to have for what takes place in Gaza now that it effectively owns the territory.

Hamas is also at fault and is also responsible. Not only because of its premeditated decision to kill, abduct, torture, and rape innocent Israeli civilians, but because of over a decade of truly detestable and indefensible decisions: for using Gaza as a launching pad for rockets, for stealing aid coming into Gaza meant for innocent Palestinian civilians, for undertaking one of the most impressive engineering projects in recorded human history in the service of creating an underground fortress to enable terrorism, for turning every Palestinian in Gaza into an unwilling human shield who is directly in the line of fire, and for using a humanitarian crisis in the midst of a war as a heartless public relations stunt designed to sacrifice every last non-Hamas Palestinian in order to denigrate Israel. Even if Hamas did not kill any of its Palestinian compatriots directly on Thursday morning, it has done everything it can to force an Israeli response to its actions that puts every single Palestinian life in Gaza at risk. This war was started by Hamas, and the lack of a ceasefire that would ease the humanitarian crisis is because Hamas refuses to lay down its arms or return the Israelis it kidnapped.

Fighting over last Thursday’s debacle is nothing short of fiddling while Gaza burns. Unlike October 7, lots of people saw this coming and have warned about what would happen absent a serious shift. While it would be nice if Hamas were to do anything to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, it is an unrepentant terrorist group, and since Israel is not, that means the burden is on Israel to fix this situation (again, life is not fair). If what happened last week was not a sufficient wakeup call, Benny Gantz’s reported shock following his meetings at the White House on Monday and belated realization of how angry U.S. officials are at Israel for the humanitarian disaster should shake responsible Israeli ministers out of their stupor. Rather than flood CNN with government spokespeople, Israel should be flooding Gaza with assistance and opening up crossings in the north to eliminate some of the thorniest transportation obstacles. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu should take last week as a costly but valuable lesson in why his plan to have either unaffiliated local officials (which is what was tried last week) or the IDF itself be in charge of security and humanitarian assistance is a recipe for repeated disasters. And above all, the Israeli government should think about whether all of its efforts to assign blame elsewhere are working, and whether its foot-dragging in order to put more pressure on Hamas is worth the enormous damage being done with every passing day to its relationship with U.S. elected officials and to Israel’s standing with a growing number of American voters, both current and future.

The humanitarian assistance and distribution problem in Gaza has to be fixed. Anyone looking to do anything other than figure out how is doing an enormous disservice to suffering Palestinians and is not acting in Israel’s long-term interests.