This is a headline I didn’t want to read once war broke out between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas:

“Israeli airstrike kills 500 in hospital.”

The report came from the Gaza Health Ministry. So … it immediately becomes somewhat suspect. However, as we are learning all over again: War is hell.

Indeed, we might learn before this war ends that it is worse than hell. The “war is hell” comment, attributed originally to Union Army Gen. William “Tecumseh” Sherman during the Civil War, almost has become a cliche, a throwaway line.

It isn’t. It is the unvarnished, unadulterated truth about humanity’s ability to inflict misery on itself.

If the report is true that an Israeli airstrike hit a Gaza hospital and inflicted the kind of casualty count that is being reported, then much about this conflict might be changing. Israel said it intends to wipe Hamas “off the face of the Earth.” I, too, want Hamas destroyed. There cannot possibly be room in a civilized world for the scale of brutality that exists in what passes in the hearts of those who inflict it.

Hamas is among the worst of the worse.

However, Israel must be accountable for hitting a hospital in the manner that is being reported.

Israel denies hitting the hospital. “We did not strike that, and that the intelligence that we have suggests that it was a failed rocket launch by the Islamic Jihad, and I want to add, categorically, that we do not intentionally strike any sensitive facilities, any sensitive facilities, and definitely not hospitals,” Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus told CNN.

I am going to presume that Israel knows and understands the rules of modern warfare. One of those rules places hospitals off limits to attack. The penalty would be to charge the attackers as war criminals.

I also am going to insist that we cannot place Israel on the same plane as Hamas. Israel has pledged to avoid killing civilians as it plans a possible frontal ground invasion of Gaza. Hamas, though, targets civilians, as it did when it started this war more than a week ago with that horrific rocket barrage into Israel.

Israel, to my mind, deserves some benefit of the doubt as the probe into this attack proceeds … but, dammit! — this is a headline I clearly did not want to read.