If you don’t look too closely you might think the photograph is a dimly lit snapshot from a slumber party or a family camping trip. Six small children lie in a row, their heads poking out from the white sheet that is casually lying across their little chests. None appear to be older than 10, though it is hard to say for sure.

At first, you might not notice the smear of drying blood in the upper right hand corner of the image. But then you do, and then it is impossible not to see that one child, second from the left, appears to be missing a chunk of skull. When you now look with your full attention, the horror of this tableau takes shape, and you see that only one child — a girl with a ponytail, probably 8 or 9 years old — looks even remotely as if she is sleeping. Her head is turned slightly, as if she had been drowsily whispering something to the girl beside her.

Then you might see the terse caption, which reads: “The bodies of children killed in an Israeli strike lie on the floor at the morgue of Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Oct. 22, 2023, as battles continue between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group.” The caption comes from Agence France-Presse; the photo from Mahmud Hams, a staff photographer there.

The children are not named. The photograph tells us nothing about whether or how these children are related. All we can know is that they are six of the more than 4,500 children who have been killed in Gaza, according to its Ministry of Health, since Israel began its military campaign in response to the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. On that day, Hamas fighters slaughtered 1,200 people, among them many children. Hundreds of Israeli hostages, including children, are believed to be held in Gaza by Hamas, their families desperate for their safe release.

This photograph has not been published by a mainstream news organization, so far as I can tell. Because of its graphic nature, The Times has decided not to publish it in full; this column is accompanied by a cropped version of the image. The full image can be seen here. It is a rare thing for mainstream news organizations to publish graphic images of dead or wounded children. Rightly so. There is nothing quite so devastating as the image of a child whose life has been snuffed out by senseless violence. The longstanding norms are to show such images sparingly, if at all.

Of course, the news media no longer needs to disseminate an image for it to be seen. Social media bludgeons us with a flood of brutal images. And in a long reporting career that has taken me to many war zones, I have seen more than my share of death in real life. I’ve gone to these places because I believe deeply in bearing witness to all facets of the human experience, including war and suffering. One of the hardest parts of journalism is witnessing horror and then trying, in words, sound and image, to convey that pain to the wider world. Many people may want to look away, to see the world as they prefer to see it. But what should we see when we see war? What should war demand all of us to see and understand? Given my experience in war zones, it is a rare thing for a violent image to stop me in my tracks. But I believe that this is an image that demands to be seen.

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By Omer Bartov

Mr. Bartov is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University.

Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide?

As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.

It is clear that the daily violence being unleashed on Gaza is both unbearable and untenable. Since the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas — itself a war crime and a crime against humanity — Israel’s military air and ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 10,500 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a number that includes thousands of children. That’s well over five times as many people as the more than 1,400 people in Israel murdered by Hamas. In justifying the assault, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements that indicate a genocidal intent.

Still, the collective horror of what we are watching does not mean that a genocide, according to the international legal definition of the term, is already underway. Because genocide, sometimes called “the crime of all crimes,” is perceived by many to be the most extreme of all crimes, there is often an impulse to describe any instance of mass murder and massacre as genocide. But this urge to label all atrocious events as genocide tends to obfuscate reality rather than explain it.

International humanitarian law identifies several grave crimes in armed conflict. War crimes are defined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent protocols as serious violations of the laws and customs of war in international armed conflict against both combatants and civilians. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, defines crimes against humanity as extermination of, or other mass crimes against, any civilian population. The crime of genocide was defined in 1948 by the United Nations as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

So in order to prove that genocide is taking place, we need to show both that there is the intent to destroy and that destructive action is taking place against a particular group. Genocide as a legal concept differs from ethnic cleansing in that the latter, which has not been recognized as its own crime under international law, aims to remove a population from a territory, often violently, whereas genocide aims at destroying that population wherever it is. In reality, any of these situations — and especially ethnic cleansing — may escalate into genocide, as happened in the Holocaust, which began with an intention to remove the Jews from German-controlled territories and transformed into the intention of their physical extermination.

My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “huge price” for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers “into rubble.” On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.”

The deeply alarming language does not end there. On Oct. 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” a statement indicating dehumanization, which has genocidal echoes. The next day, the head of the Israeli Army’s coordinator of government activities in the territories, Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic: “Human animals must be treated as such,” he said, adding: “There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”

The same day, retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland wrote in the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” He added, “Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.” In another article, he wrote that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.” Apparently, no army representative or politician denounced this statement.

I could quote many more.

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Trapped in the enclave, Palestinians on the social media platform are documenting and sharing their harrowing experiences of life under Israeli airstrikes and a ground invasion.

The war in Gaza is unfolding on your cellphone.

It’s being captured and narrated by Palestinians, trapped in the besieged enclave with cellphones, a command of English and large Instagram followings.

While Israel and Egypt are preventing most journalists from entering Gaza, these Palestinians are documenting the devastation of Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion in stories and reels. Their posts are intimate and raw — capturing images that mainstream media might consider too graphic to run.

They live the war they’re covering: surviving bombardments, rationing food and water, and sheltering in hospitals.

They are not neutral observers, and in their impassioned posts, they don’t purport to be. Some even accuse them of being propagandists for Hamas, which runs Gaza.

In response to Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, Israel began an intense bombing campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 10,500 people, including over 4,300 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry. U.N. experts have declared that “the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.”

At least 33 Palestinian media workers have been killed inside Gaza, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Yet Palestinians in Gaza keep documenting the brutal war, attracting millions of followers around the world.

Here are three of them.

MOTAZ AZAIZA
@motaz_azaiza

It was 4 a.m. when Motaz Azaiza fell asleep on Oct. 7.

The 24-year-old had been up late editing a video for a U.N. agency where he worked as a part-time producer, and watching “Friends” reruns.

Two hours later, he awoke to the sound of explosions and ran to his roof to see a barrage of rockets above him. There had been no warning, no exchange of fire that typically signaled a full-blown war. But one had started while he was asleep.

Hamas-led fighters had breached the barriers dividing Gaza from Israel, attacking soldiers and residents of nearby communities. Israeli officials said about 240 people were taken captive and around 1,400 people, mainly civilians but some soldiers, were killed in Israel.

In response, Israel launched a full-scale war against Hamas, trapping Mr. Azaiza and two million others under bombardment in Gaza, a tinderbox after decades of conflict.

Mr. Azaiza, who had already lived through four wars, grabbed his camera, and stepped out into an unraveling world.

Armed Palestinian men whizzed by in an Israeli military Jeep with three captives, two of them in uniform, and paraded them before residents, he said. Mr. Azaiza remembers the fear in one of the captive’s eyes.

HIND KHOUDARY
@hindkhoudary

NOOR HARAZEEN
@noor.harazeen

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A century after Adolf Hitler’s first attempt to seize power in Germany by force, it is worth remembering the economic and political conditions that gave the Nazis momentum in the first place. In an era of recrudescent nationalism and chauvinism, such historical lessons have gained new urgency.

DUBLIN – This month marks an instructive centenary. On the morning of November 9, 1923, a 34-year-old Adolf Hitler led a column of 2,000 armed men through central Munich. The goal was to seize power by force in the Bavarian capital before marching on to Berlin. There, they would destroy the Weimar Republic – the democratic political system that had been established in Germany during the winter of 1918-19 – and replace it with an authoritarian regime committed to violence.

Marching alongside Hitler was a 50-year-old Bavarian regional court judge, Baron Theodor von der Pfordten, who carried a legal document that would have become the basis for the constitution of the new state. It included provisions to justify the mass execution of the Nazis’ political opponents, as well as especially drastic measures targeting Germany’s Jews, who accounted for around 1% of the population. Jewish civil servants were to be immediately dismissed and any non-Jewish German who tried to help them was to be punished with death.

The march was led by men carrying Swastika flags and included at least one truck with a machine gun mounted on its back. Standing at the front was Hitler, who wore civilian clothing, whereas everyone else had donned military or paramilitary uniforms.

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