In times of conflict, language becomes another weapon used by the warring sides on the battlefield of public opinion. This has been painfully true of Israel’s War on Gaza: how to describe Hamas—a legitimate resistance movement against occupation, or a terrorist organization bent on Israel’s destruction; the onslaught on the Strip—a measure of Israel’s right to defend itself or a calculated military operation that is the centerpiece of a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Since October 7, 2023, these questions have been asked, hashed and rehashed, debated and debunked in newsrooms around the world. At the Cairo Review, we recognized these considerations as important to our coverage of the death and destructive power of Israel’s invasion of Gaza but acknowledged that the images of humanity under attack were undeniable snapshots of a civilian population brought to its knees in despair and suffering.

The images—and the stories they tell—truly answer the questions being contemplated by editorial teams around the world. That is why we chose our cover photo to be of Inas Abu Maamar, a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian woman embracing the body of her five-year-old niece Saly, who was killed in an Israeli strike, at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 17, 2023. The photo, taken by Reuters photographer Mohammad Salem at the Nasser Hospital morgue, where residents were going to search for missing relatives, exemplifies the horrific nature of the Israeli military juggernaut in Gaza and the gravity of a collective decay of human moral sensibility.

Salem writes that he saw Inas squatting on the ground in the morgue, sobbing and tightly embracing Saly’s body. “I lost my conscience when I saw the girl, I took her in my arms,” Inas said. “The doctor asked me to let go… but I told them to leave her with me.”

The Health Ministry in Gaza says that at least 26,900 people have been killed since Israel launched its reprisal campaign against Hamas on October 7. More than 10,000 of those have been children. In recent days, Israeli intelligence has confirmed that the figures are accurate.

It is not surprising why Palestinians, and many in the region, believe that Hamas is a pretext for a long-existing campaign to ethnically cleanse and repopulate the Gaza Strip, writes Nadia Naser-Najjab, a Senior Lecturer in Palestine Studies at the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, UK. But can annexation of the Gaza Strip provide Israel with the peace and security it seeks? No, say many regional experts, who instead insist that the two-state solution remains the best hope for Middle East stability.

In the piece, Peace and Security After the War in Gaza, Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies Ibrahim Awad says that in order to pursue a two-state solution, the international community must be able to conquer three main points of contention: Israeli occupation, the creation of a Palestinian state, and the role of Hamas.

Pursuing and reaching a two-state solution requires that the Palestinian–Israeli conflict be positioned within its historical context since even before 1948, and not be looked at in isolation from October 7, 2023 onwards.

That responsibility falls on the global media, who still have much to do in order to objectively and fairly cover the conflict.  In Covering the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: Between Exasperation and Empathy, Lawrence Pintak, the founding dean of The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, and a former CBS News Middle East correspondent, uses his personal on-the-ground experience to reflect on how American media needs to do a better job covering Arab and Palestinian affairs.

But there is a glimmer of hope as the media begins to shift to more equitable reporting on the Gaza carnage. How American Public Opinion on Palestine Has Shifted, by Geneive Abdo, examines how overlapping connections among young activist groups have been key for a dramatic shift in how the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is being perceived in the United States. These and other essays reflect the diverse perspectives offered in this special issue of the Cairo Review titled “Gaza”, especially voices from the region that are marginalized in mainstream international coverage of the war.

Cairo Review Co-Managing Editors,

Karim Haggag

Firas Al-Atraqchi