The sudden eruption of open warfare in the Middle East brought about by the generational on-again, off-again conflict between Israel and Hamas caught the world by surprise and has appalled all of us for the untold death and destruction sparing no one, young or old, woman or child, Jew or Christian, Israeli or Filipino, both combatants and innocent bystanders, that has persisted through the ages in Palestine.

In a world of non-stop 24/7 streaming, our consciousness is constantly bombarded by jarring images of a bloodied Israeli woman being pulled by her hair as she is roughly pushed into a military vehicle; a Hamas fighter, a rocket-propelled grenade in hand, standing over an unconscious German-Israeli woman as a jeering mob spits on her; scores of barefoot fathers and half-naked children forcibly shoved into vehicles and certain captivity; reveling music festival goers mowed down mercilessly by Hamas intruders who swooped down on the unsuspecting Israelis, all committed ironically amid triumphant salutations to Allah.

But then, as the Israelis started to counter attack, the clouds over Gaza darkened during the day and blazed into the night, as rockets unceasingly rained down on the hapless Palestinians with the nightmare not yet in sight as the Israeli Defense Forces prepared to launch a ground assault on Gaza promising hellish apocalypse in revenge for their own thousands of deaths.

And from the rubble of collapsed buildings, you see dazed, dust-covered, bloodied Palestinians, young as well as old, crying, screaming, seemingly running aimlessly for succor — one can't help but wonder how human beings can inflict so much inhumanity on each other. Unquestionably, there now exists a no-holds-barred state of war between Israel and Hamas, and God only knows when this holocaust will end.

Why do we have wars? When you try googling the definition of war, it is quite surprising to see that there are actually quite a number of interpretations and perspectives of what academically defines a war. I thought war was simply a state of conflict between nations, states, or people, resulting in untold deaths to the protagonists.

But in a research paper by Dr. Johann Van Der Dennen, a noted behavioral scientist specializing in Peace Research at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who has published extensively on all aspects of violence and aggression, he succinctly covered in a literary review and bibliography a slew of political sociologists' works entitled WAR: Concepts, Definitions and Research Data, on what is war.