Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. She is from North Carolina but lives in Dubai, where she works as a strategy and public policy consultant. She had spoken passionately about her efforts to raise money to support people struggling to survive in Gazagvg777, where she has mentored young Palestinians over the past decade. As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch. As often happens when Americans meet abroad these days, we talked about the U.S. election, unfolding as the war in Gaza spreads to Lebanon.

In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, I suggested, with so many issues at stake she would set aside those concerns and cast her crucial swing state ballot for Harris, given the stark choice between her and Donald Trump. It seemed, I suppose, obvious to me. My mind was already made up: I would be voting for Harris.

But as soon as I uttered the words I felt a hot bolt of shame. As a journalist I have a longstanding aversion to publicly supporting candidates, even if privately I have my preferences. But this was something else: a sense that I had no business telling this person, whose family experienced dispossession and exile, who was watching people from her family’s homeland die every day, how to vote, no matter the stakes from my perspective. Odeh was gracious. If she was shocked or offended, she did not let on. She sent me a warm email a few days later saying how much she enjoyed hearing about my work.

Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.

This siege has produced indelible images, like the body of a teenager named Shaaban al-Dalou engulfed in flames at the encampment where he and his family sheltered in tents next to a hospital in Deir al-Balah. On Wednesday, Abdulaziz al-Bardini, a medic in the same city, wailed and sobbed as he discovered that the battered body he was transporting was that of his mother, Samira. She was killed in an Israeli strike on a car in the Maghazi refugee camp, The Associated Press reported.

Dozens of people, including at least 25 children, died when Israeli forces struck an apartment building in which some 150 people had taken shelter in Beit Lahia on Tuesday, the Palestinian Civil Defense said. A State Department spokesman called it “a horrifying incident with a horrifying result.” The top United Nations humanitarian official issued a stark warning last week: “The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying.”

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