Yeah But… What About Hamas and 7 October?

It’s the go to response in defence of Israel’s genocide in Gaza - a rhetorical smokescreen used to justify the unjustifiable. It’s an excuse to make the levelling of hospitals and refugee camps necessary and excusable.

The logic goes like this:

Yeah but… they started it.

Yeah but… Hamas hides among civilians.

Yeah but… Israel has the right to defend itself.

But here’s the thing. This Yeah But isn’t a call for justice. It’s a deflection. It’s a moral weapon designed to shut down scrutiny. One atrocity is being used to excuse more. One day of horror by terrorists is wielded as a licence for collective punishment of innocent civilians.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas militants launched a deadly attack on Israel. Civilians were murdered. Children were taken hostage. Families were torn apart. It was a war crime. It was horrific. It was unjustifiable.

But it’s possible, and indeed essential, to hold two truths at once. Hamas terrorists committed a heinous act of violence. AndIsrael is now perpetrating an ongoing and disproportionate campaign of genocide and collective punishment against an entire population of innocent civilians.

Since 7 October, Gaza has become a graveyard. Over 100,000 Palestinians are dead. Hundreds of thousands more are wounded and missing. Entire families have been erased. Homes destroyed. Hospitals bombed. Refugee camps destroyed. Children buried beneath rubble. Food and water deliberately withheld. International law ignored.

Yet calls to stop the killing are met with the same refrain: Yeah but… Hamas.

This isn’t accountability. It is moral exceptionalism. It implies that some lives are worth more than others. That Israeli grief demands global empathy, but Palestinian suffering is a political inconvenience.

This Yeah But aims to silence those who speak for justice. To paralyse governments. To sanitise genocide.

The grief of 7 October is real. The trauma is deep. But that grief does not justify war crimes. Trauma doesn’t excuse ethnic cleansing. And no past horror gives any nation the right to erase another people.

Justice demands consistency. Peace demands honesty. Human rights aren’t conditional on who hurt whom first.

So when someone says, “Yeah but… what about Hamas?”, remember: it’s not a question. It’s a distraction.

And silence in the face of genocide is not neutrality. It is complicity.