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Notes -
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
We have diplomatic relations that we could use to pressure Israel into stopping the assault. Israel has a recognized and legitimate power structure with leaders who we can negotiate with and who could change their policy if we convinced them to.
There things are not true of Hamas. It would be nice if they surrendered, but there's no singular leader or group who could command that to happen and be obeyed, and we wouldn't have meaningful diplomatic relations with them if they would.
Speech is usually a consequentialist act designed to achieve a specific outcome.
Remember the story of the madman, who wants to hide his madness and decides to say only true things; after he has stopped 50 people on the street to emphatically tell them that the sky is blue, everyone knows he is mad for sure.
People don't just go around saying every true thing they know just because they're true; they say the things they think will accomplish what they want in the saying.
Saying that you wish Israel would stop is not very likely to end the violence at this point, but there's at least a clear and straightforward causal mechanism by which it might minorly contribute to something like that happening in the future.
Saying that you wish Hamas would surrender (as an American at least) has no clear path by which it could have any effect on the ongoing conflict. If anything, the most likely outcome of people saying such things en masse is that it splits the conversation into 'teams' (arguments as soldiers) over which side should be responsible for ending the conflict, thus taking responsibility away from Israel and weakening the international pressure on them to stop.
Thus, it is reasonably interpreted as a wish for Israel to continue its attacks, since that would be the most straightforward strategic outcome accomplished by insistently pushing that narrative into the public conversation.
That's why people aren't saying it.
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