Perhaps in all the years in this lifetime that Israel has been at war, we Filipinos never made enough sense of what it is really about.

Not until we learned, since 7 October, how cruel and bitter it can be — in the photos of a grown man forever captured screaming into the air over his dead nephew's body; of shrouded bodies that may never be identified; or a clip of a father holding plastic bags of his kids' remains. And the babies. And the burned bodies. And the blood splattered all over a bomb shelter.

No one — unless it is you or yours — can imagine how it truly feels.

If you can feel rage and grief at seeing images alone, how much more can your heart take if it were happening right before you?

"We are all human," a father said on Tiktok. It was he who posted about that father with the plastic bags. "There is no difference between me and this man. When we talk of kids getting killed, bombed, or put on fire, it doesn't really matter what you believe in, where you come from, or what religion you follow. This is never acceptable! You just have to be a human being to stand up and say stop."

Now I am not sure whether this man was genuine (heaven knows there has been plenty of fake and biased news) or if it was propaganda designed to turn sympathy toward a specific cause. But what he said about being human was true. Amid all the atrocious crimes we have seen in the war raging in Gaza, we need to view the whole situation through our humanity.

When Gaza struck Israel the way Hitler hit the Jewish people — with extreme violence and a detailed plan to eliminate the enemy in very specific ways — we recoiled. We remembered. But when Israel defended itself, many condemned it. Why? Many immediately concluded that the war was a Palestinian issue, or about Israel's attempt at occupation or conquest. It is not.

So, while it is natural to react the way we do over civilian casualties and collateral damage — likely letting our emotions get the better of us — we need to muster the sense to take it all in with the correct perspective.

We must know more, learn more. Shooting from the hip or erupting without understanding — well, wouldn't that be just as bad as the perpetrators of the war?

What is fact and what is fiction? We must seek the truth in light of the misinformation being deliberately spread on social media.

One such claim was debunked on Associated Press recently, about the bombing of a hospital in Gaza supposedly by the Israeli military. This was spread in a social media post written in Arabic.

AP said, "No such post exists on the military's actual social media pages and its top Arabic-speaking spokesperson confirmed his office had issued no such statement."

To think this is but one aspect of the entire issue. Let's begin with the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization. It is not about Palestine, it is about pushing Islamic supremacy through force. Israel, if you think about it, has "no quarrel with Palestinians," as Israel Ambassador to the Philippines Ilan Fluss, himself emphasized in a talk with DAILY TRIBUNE on Monday.

"We are in a war against Hamas, not Palestinians — we have to defend our citizens," he said.

It is a "war of survival," he added. Israel has long been fighting against Islamic forces that want to see it obliterated from the planet. "We don't have a choice. We will fight. We will win."

The ambassador added, "The charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. And it says that there is no political agreement…no political agreement can be reached with Israel. Israel has to be eliminated, and Israelis and Jews have to be killed. That's the agenda of their philosophy. It has to be an Islamic land.

"So, when people ask me today, what is the political future here? I say this is a question that you have to ask Hamas or the Palestinians, because in Israel, we have a government that makes decisions, makes a lot more, and when we sign a document, we respect it, and we can negotiate. We're a political entity.

"Hamas is not in a negotiating position. It is in a war position to eliminate Israel. Very simple. And you see the history. I'm not going into the long history, but Israel had pulled out of Gaza since 2005. We are not controlling Gaza. We are on the international border. So, it's not about a few patients. It is about an organization that, every few years, initiates again an attack against Israel. This time it was the biggest…"

However, the ambassador admits, on a personal level, that a solution seems hazy "because it is continuing and we are living in a complicated neighborhood," he told this columnist. The enemies are "fundamentalists that are promoting these Islamic states, promising these fundamentalistic terror agenda…"

Ambassador Fluss may be keeping it all real as a diplomat, but what he may not ever say is that this war is about all of us, too — humans and families and connected lives.

When a Filipino caregiver refuses to leave her ward, sacrificing her own life to the end, that is humanity. But to believe that life is only worth living if another race or culture is removed, where is the humanity in that?