Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images
One of the most important aspects of Israel’s messaging on the ongoing Gaza conflict—more accurately termed war propaganda—has been to conflate the Palestinians in Gaza, and even Palestinians in general, with Hamas and the brutal, dehumanizing attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
This rhetorical conflation, coupled with rhetoric of dehumanization (Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals”), serves the cold imperative of rationalizing and minimizing the death and destruction currently being meted out to the 2.1 million civilians crammed into this tiny area. The alarming rhetoric by Israeli and Hamas political leaders, often matched by their actions, implicitly and even explicitly claim that there are “no civilians” on the other side.
This all-to-common sensibility of bloodlust in the midst of a conflict is exactly why the international community developed the laws of war, mainly in the 20th century, including several key instruments, like the Fourth Geneva Convention, specifically designed to outline the rights and protections of civilians caught in the middle of military campaigns.