What makes the situation triply dangerous is that even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday.

As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and Islamic Jihad rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that Islamic Jihad accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The Arab street was on fire, and a meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled.

If people cannot talk openly and honestly about a misfired rocket, imagine what will happen when the first major Israeli invasion of Gaza begins in our wired world, linked by social networks and polluted with misinformation amplified by artificial intelligence.

what a tremendous pile of shit