Palestinian civilians are suffering at the hands of Israel and Hamas

As TV screens are flooded with images of dead children being pulled out of the rubble after Israeli bomb strikes in Gaza, the question of how to protect Palestinian civilians is stoking passions in Israel, the entire Middle East, and the United States.

Humanitarian aid organizations are demanding an unconditional cease-fire in the Hamas-Israel war to stop the bloodshed and ramp up the still limited aid that Israel is permitting to enter Gaza. President Joe Biden has vaguely called for a “pause” in the conflict to get more hostages out and more aid in, and sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the region to try and make it happen.

However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected any permanent cease-fire, has told Blinken that Israel “refuses a temporary cease-fire that doesn’t include a return of our hostages,” those seized by Hamas during its Oct. 7 rampage. That demand is understandable, but the dire humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza requires action right now.

Clearly, Netanyahu is in no hurry. Israelis are still reeling from the brutal murder of more than 1,000 civilians and the kidnapping of more than 220 others. They rightly blame Hamas for causing Palestinian deaths. The terrorist group has built a huge military tunnel network underneath hospitals, schools, mosques, and apartment buildings in Gaza which puts all those buildings at risk. And Hamas appears in no hurry to release hostages quickly.

» READ MORE: The roots and nuances of the Israel-Hamas war | Trudy Rubin

But as the blame game goes on, and the diplomatic dance continues, two million Gazans are running out of food, water, fuel for hospitals, and any hope of safety — while Israeli planes drop bunker buster bombs that not only strike the tunnels but destroy entire neighborhoods above.

So, yes, Israel has a legitimate right to self-defense, but its indifference to civilian suffering is morally unacceptable and strategically foolish. It risks not only the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians, but the widening of the war to Israel’s north, the destruction of the Abraham Accords, and prospects for peace with Saudi Arabia.

If a full cease-fire is not yet plausible, there needs to be a temporary humanitarian halt in Israel’s aerial bombing and ground offensive until there are measures in place to enable Palestinian civilians to find food, water, and safety. That is what Biden and Blinken should be insisting on now.

Talk with humanitarian aid groups about their staff trapped under the Israeli siege and you become acquainted with the suffering of ordinary Gazan civilians. All the staff for the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization that has helped women and children in Gaza for decades, have seen their homes destroyed by bombs, and each has lost multiple family members.

The group’s Gaza staff director, Firas Ramlawi, managed to get a text to Philly on Thursday, saying his cousin had just been killed when sheltering with his family at Shifa Hospital by “a helicopter shooting the civilians inside the hospital.”

“The fuel [supply] will be reaching zero within two days,” Ramlawi said, “and the bakeries are all closed and for drinking water we only have one liter [four glasses] every two days. The garbage is high everywhere and soon it will be pandemic.”

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AFSC’s global policy director, Mike Merryman-Lotze, told me that two of the main hospitals in Gaza have run out of fuel, despite having “650 patients with kidney failure, 42 babies in incubators, and 62 severely injured patients in need of urgent care.”

Israel justifies its fuel embargo by blaming Hamas because it hoards fuel for its own use, fuel it could provide for hospitals, generators, and pumping clean water. Yet ordinary Gazans have no control over Hamas, which rules by the gun.

Moreover, the Islamist group clearly sees civilian suffering as beneficial to its cause, by inflaming Mideast public and global opinion against Israel.

Mousa Abu Marzook, a prominent member of the Hamas political bureau, told Russia Today’s Arabic channel that Hamas had never built shelters for civilians within its tunnels. “It is the U.N.’s responsibility to protect them,” Marzook said, specifying that the tunnels were only to safeguard Hamas fighters. You can’t get more callous than that.

Why, then, lacking food, water, and shelter, don’t Gazans evacuate to the south, as Israel has demanded they do, while Israeli troops battle in the north and Gaza City? The answer is simple: For the poor and the sick, along with many families, there is no way to travel and no way to get food or shelter on arrival. And even if they do move south, they are likely to be bombed en route or when they arrive.

Ramlawi, the AFSC staff director, described to his colleagues how his elderly mother, twice wounded, “refuses to leave the house, saying she’d rather die at home than sleep on the street.” He decided to stay with her to be close to his relatives “because if you have no family no one will help to get you out of the rubble or bury you.”

Given these realities, it is essential that the Biden team expand the “pause” concept to offer Gazan civilians a genuine chance to find safety as well as enable a regular flow of aid to southern Gaza.

» READ MORE: The fog of rage should not guide Israel’s wartime decisions on humanitarian aid to Gaza | Trudy Rubin

The Jewish group Americans for Peace Now has written to Blinken asking him to press for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to enable safe passage for Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza and the establishment of “no bomb zones” within the strip that would serve as havens for civilians. I would add that, to guarantee those zones remained safe, Biden would need to pledge that if they were violated, the United States would no longer veto U.N. resolutions calling for an Israeli cease-fire.

Moreover, there is one more element that is critical to getting Gazans to risk moving to “no bomb zones.” At present, many fear their move south will only be a way station before Israel kicks them out of Gaza entirely and into tent camps in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, never to return.

Egypt says it would block such a plan, but the idea has been tossed around among far-right Israeli politicians who don’t disguise their desire to push Palestinians out.

“There is an existential issue here,” I was told by Sean Carroll, president and CEO of Anera, an American organization for Mideast aid. “People are fearful that if they leave, they will never get their lands or homes back.”

That is why it is important for Biden and Blinken to continue pressing Netanyahu to think seriously about what happens the day after this war ends and make clear that the U.S. opposes ethnic cleansing in Gaza in the future.

For now, as the war rages, every effort should be made to save civilian lives.