Grief means little. Rage matters even less. All that we have now are the cold, unfeeling facts: Kfir Bibas, the baby smiling sweetly at us in the photograph, holding his pink elephant, was taken violently from his home, together with his mother, Shiri, and his 4-year-old brother, Ariel. They were held in Gaza and eventually murdered. We may never know the details of their ordeal, but we know plenty about their tormentors. For nearly 18 months, we’ve been collecting forensic evidence about the specimens who live in Gaza. What do we know about them? The question matters. A lot. In fact, no other does, particularly as Israel and the United States are trying to ascertain how to proceed now that the first round of the ceasefire agreement with Hamas is nearing its end.

What do we know, then?

We know the numbers: A large-scale survey of Gazans, conducted by researchers from Oxford University and published in Foreign Affairs just last week, showed that whereas only 36% of Gazans supported Hamas prior to October 7, 2023, the number spiked to well over a half in March 2024, and began to decline only when Israel successfully eliminated Yahya Sinwar in October of last year. Which should come as no surprise considering the fact that 98% of those surveyed described themselves as religious, and nearly as many said they saw the conflict with Israel in religious, not political terms: The Jews were usurpers who must be banished. How? When asked, 47% said they wanted to see Israel destroyed and replaced with a strict Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and 20% said they would settle merely for the forced removal of all Jews and their transfer to wherever it was their ancestors had lived prior to immigrating to Israel. The moderates, 17% of them, said they would be all right merely with embracing the Palestinian right of return, a kinder, gentler way to end the Jewish state.

And we know the stories: Many of the Israeli hostages who return tell variations of the same tale, of being held captive by ordinary families, abused and tormented not by bearded zealots with guns but by mothers and fathers and daughters and sons. Liri Albag, for example, the brave IDF soldier who was released in January, was enslaved by one such family, which did not allow her to shower for 37 days and, witnessing her growing faint with hunger, ridiculed her and refused to let her eat any of the food she was forced to cook for her captors.

Such gleeful cruelty has no parallel in the civilized world. Sure, war is hell, and combat rarely concludes without a handful of shocking aberrations. A soldier may crack and do the unthinkable. A rocket might miss its mark, snuffing out innocent lives. That is all too regrettable, and all but unavoidable. But that is not what is happening in Gaza. The footage of a dead Jewish baby returning home to Israel for burial compels us to tell the truth: The assertion that most, or even many, Gazans are innocents hijacked by their tyrannical leaders is a polite fiction. There are certainly some somewhere in the strip, the very young and the very frail included, who neither partook in nor condone the atrocities of the past 18 months, but they should no more redeem Gaza’s genocidal enterprise than the hypothetical 10 good men of Sodom and Gomorrah could the cities of the plain.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and the host of its weekly podcast, “Rootless,” and its daily Talmud podcast, “Take One.”