Apologies, it might not have been you, but the general gist of the conversation seemed to be that the Gazans are completely helpless.
I think the comment about innocents in Gaza expresses a profound frustration and despair about the brainwashing that seems to have taken place on some social media platforms. Hamas are terrorists who fight a very dirty war, and although all countries use propaganda during wartime, they take it to the next level by bombarding us with distressing images. And it seems to be working - at least here on MN, where it seems to be widely accepted that Israel is conducting a "genocide" when all the evidence points to that being precisely what Hamas has in mind (i.e. systematic extermination or persecution of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, religion, nationality, or race). They must be laughing up their sleeves to see the liberal Westerners marching solemnly to chants of "From the river to the sea."
They also ensure that it is impossible to tell the difference between a Hamas activist and an ordinary Gazan civilian, and report deaths as though all of them are innocent well-wishers, but statistically that seems unlikely: in December 2023, according to a poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, about 57% of Gazans supported Hamas’s attack on Israel. By March 2024, that figure had increased to 71%.
Because Israel refrains from using such underhand propaganda tactics, I have literally seen posts on MN dismissing the horrors of Nova Festival as just a bunch of kids getting shot at when running to the cars, and oh by the way it serves them right for dancing like no tomorrow when the poor Gazans were suffering right nextdoor.
I am not going to describe the gut-wrenching horrors that were actually visited upon the victims that day; you have access to Google and presumably are not just a passive consumer of a biased Insta feed. (I've met two of the survivors. Well, one now that the other has committed suicide because it was impossible to live with the memory of what took place.)
I'm assuming your heart is in the right place, so I urge you to look up the actual meaning of "genocide" and try to understand why this is particularly insulting to the Jewish race, not just historically but in the context of Hamas's stated intent to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Had that been Israel's intention towards Gaza, they easily have the capacity to have achieved it by now, instead of killing an estimated 2.3% to 4% of the Gazan population (still terrible, obviously, but not a genocide in the accepted meaning of the word).
Add to this the difficulty of fighting against a terrorist enemy that disguises itself as civilians, and you begin to get the idea of just how impossible Israel's position is, and how evil Hamas are.