What happened on Oct. 7, 2023, was as brutal as it gets on humanity’s scale of conduct. In fact, it was below the bottom of the chart. Hamas gunmen butchered almost 2,000 individuals, many women and small children. Rape doesn’t even begin to describe what happened to many women during the assault.

War is a dreadful thing where allowances and even permissions for the most brutal of behaviors seem to go with the expected carnage. History is replete with examples of wartime’s worst human atrocities. Attempts to govern the scope of these atrocities are noble but seemingly futile. The Geneva Conventions are an example of these efforts related to proportionality, and designed to protect the sick, wounded, prisoners of war and all civilians.

These rules of war, sometimes referred to as International Humanitarian Law (IHL) get more explicit with details regarding poison gas, cluster munitions, torture, the protection of medical workers and the press for example, but they are dependent on a nation’s willingness to sign on to these rules and submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Among others, China, Russia, the United States, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey either never signed the agreement (known as the Rome Statute) or it was never legislatively approved in those countries.

Israel never signed on to the Rome Statute because it feared possible prosecution from its settlement incursions into the Palestinian territories. It’s argued that these encroachments were part of the reasons for the Palestinian attacks on Oct. 7, along with Israeli controls over Palestinian rights, seizures of land and property, and restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement. All that being said, the brutal behavior of Hamas militant attacks in October remains reprehensible and unforgivable.

The Israeli blitz in retaliation has now lasted three months and the devastation is staggering. Estimations put the number of Palestinians killed at over 23,000 with close to 60,000 wounded. Of these it is further estimated that of the numbers killed or wounded, over 70 percent have been women and children. These numbers are reported by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, not Hamas which reports slightly higher numbers.

Israel has a right to self-defense. Zero argument there. The looming question is how much is enough? How disproportionate can the retaliation be before going beyond the rest of the world’s initial empathy and subsequent tolerance for inhumane behavior.

The numbers go beyond the statistics of death and injury. Three weeks ago, the United Nations declared that close to 30 percent of Gazans were starving. According to the UN’s chief economist for the World Food Program, “It doesn’t get any worse. I have never seen something of the scale that is happening in Gaza, and at this speed.”

More than 80 percent of the population of Gaza have been driven from their homes, according to the United Nations.

Last December, according to the World Health Organization, only six of all Gaza’s health facilities were functioning, and those facilities have seriously diminished medicines and supplies with few doctors left in service.

Public Television reported that Gaza is in a food crisis “with 576,600 Palestinians at catastrophic or starvation levels.” Because of the lack of nourishment, immune systems are weak and outbreaks of disease are rampant.

Collateral damage is growing. When Israel was attacked, U.S. support for Israel was automatic as it should have been, but as the gross damage and human atrocities have escalated to catastrophic proportions, the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu has put the U.S. in extremely awkward circumstances.

The U.S. has worked hard to get a cease fire to allow for humanitarian assistance to get into Gaza, but the Israeli military has only allowed a trickle. Secretary of State Blinken has made many trips to Israel and the Arab Middle East to try to curtail the war, get aid in, and prevent an escalation of the war. Missile strikes by Hezbollah into Israel and Israel into Lebanon, Houthi strikes on shipping in the Red Sea, Iran’s fueling of these military attacks by Hezbollah, Houthis and other militants against U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Syria are all accelerants that could cause the Middle East to explode unless the U.S. and other Arab states can de-escalate actions in the region.

Some of the heaviest pressure Netanyahu is experiencing is from Israelis who are now demanding a cease fire agreement to allow for the release of remaining hostages, determined by Israel to be about 132, including about 25 soldiers and civilians who are no longer alive.

The idiom of “cut off your nose to spite your face,” comes to mind as a report in the New York Times indicated that the war with Hamas has seriously damaged Israel’s tech firms and its tech-heavy economy, which “has been jolted by worker shortages and funding fears,” raising expectations of a major slowdown in 2024. Tourism has for the most part evaporated. About 350,000 army reservists have been called up, “disrupting operations at many companies with many customer orders on hold or canceled, and investors getting cold feet.”

My paternal grandfather was Jewish. His family escaped Russia during the ethnic and expelling pogroms of the 1880s. I completely understand the ethnic sufferings endured by Jewish people during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today. But it troubles me deeply to hear comments, as limited as they are so far, comparing Israeli tactics in Gaza to the Gestapo enforcement tactics of the 1940s in Europe. Being accused of genocide by South Africa at the International Criminal Court makes things even worse.

It’s just one man’s opinion, but in my view it’s time for Israel to make what’s left of their military operation in Gaza more surgical, to allow adequate amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, to work with its Arab neighbors to put a plan together for Gaza governance after the military operation ends, and to fully realize that its current fighting is only further alienating Israel from the rest of the world, with downstream effects that will have potentially long-term devastating diplomatic and economic consequences.

Bill Sims is a Hillsboro resident, retired president of the Denver Council on Foreign Relations, an author and runs a small farm in Berrysville with his wife. He is a former educator, executive and foundation president.