A picture says a thousand words. And the imagery slowly seeping out of Gaza tells a story that many politicians and media figures are still doing their best to ignore or obfuscate. Updated satellite imagery on Google Maps of the devastated region, drone shots of dystopian aid checkpoints, and military maps of so-called “safe zones” make it increasingly hard to argue that Israel’s military “operation” (to use a sanitizing word the media is incredibly fond of) is about eradicating Hamas. This isn’t an operation – it’s a cremation: one with the ultimate goal of eradicating not just Palestinian life in Gaza, but Palestinian identity altogether.
First, though, I want to stress that there still isn’t a lot of imagery coming out of Gaza. This is by design – and something I wish more of my colleagues in the western media were outraged about. Israel has not allowed foreign journalists into the territory since the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023, save for carefully curated tours by the Israeli army. It is systematically slaughtering Palestinian journalists on the ground. And it is placing heavy restrictions on foreign aid workers who are let into Gaza.
The Israeli government, meanwhile, is trying to control the narrative with its own visual materials. A picture says a thousand words, but pictures can obviously be manipulated or misrepresented. And there are numerous instances where Israel has been found to have misrepresented imagery. Last year, for example, Forensic Architecture, a research agency that investigates human rights violations, analyzed visual material presented by Israel’s defence team in hearings at the international court of justice (ICJ).
Forensic Architecture’s report states that they found “eight instances where the Israeli legal team misrepresented the visual evidence they cited, through a combination of incorrect annotations and labelling, and misleading verbal descriptions” – a very long way of saying: “They lied.” One example of these misleading verbal descriptions: Israel’s team presented the ICJ with what they described as “evidence of a rocket launched from next to Gaza’s water desalination facility”. Forensic Architecture noted that “the highlighted feature is more likely a crater caused by an air drop munition from an Israeli strike”.
More recently, a Sky News analysis of video footage taken from one of the many hospitals in Gaza that have been bombed contradicted Israel’s claim that it was targeting a Hamas “command and control centre” underneath a hospital. Israel published a video taken from an aerial surveillance aircraft with a highlighted building marked as “European Hospital”. Sky News, however, showed that the building was actually a school and the “command center” appeared to be a drainage ditch.
I point all this out because great pains have been taken by US politicians and some people in the media to insist that Israel can always be trusted to tell the truth, while Palestinians are frauds who shouldn’t be listened to. Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices are over-exaggerating the severity of the situation, we keep being told by “reasonable” centrist voices in the media, who seem keen to ignore the growing consensus by genocide scholars (including Israeli scholars) that this is not a “conflict”, it is a genocide.
The US government (both this administration and the Biden-Harris administration) has been instrumental in this atrocity denial. In late October 2023, Joe Biden, who spread lies about Hamas beheading babies, said he had “no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth” about the number of casualties in Gaza. Ever since then, certain parts of the media have repeatedly tried to suggest that the official death toll in Gaza (which is a severe undercount, if anything) has been inflated by those devious Palestinians.
Whenever horrific videos come out of Gaza – one of the latest shows a child filmed trying to escape a fire caused by an Israeli strike on a school housing displaced people – some of Israel’s worst apologists will rush to spread misinformation about “Pallywood”. The dead babies are just dolls! The fire is CGI! Turns out Gaza has a better special effects department than Hollywood! Anything remotely inconvenient to Israel’s assertion that they have “the most moral army in the world” is dismissed as fake news.
If you don’t trust Palestinians, then perhaps you will trust Google Maps. We still don’t have the full picture of what Gaza looks like right now, but updates are slowly coming through and updated satellite imagery of the devastation is being shared widely on social media. Most of the updated imagery is from the weeks and months following 7 October 2023 – still very early in the carnage.
Even still, the scale of the devastation makes clear that this is not a targeted “operation”, it is a scorched-earth campaign. Eerily, at least three places in Gaza on Google Maps have also now been marked as “haunted houses”. It’s not clear why this is, but some people have expressed suspicion that Israeli soldiers have changed the name for fun.
Some Israeli soldiers have, after all, posted photos of themselves playing with underwear from the homes of women who have been displaced. “The dehumanization from the top is very much sinking down to the soldiers,” a spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has said in reference to visual evidence of Israeli soldiers acting maliciously.
Don’t just look at Google Maps – look at the maps that Israel is putting out and the changing “safe zones”. Last December, a small strip of land in south Gaza was marked on a map as a “humanitarian zone”. Last month, however, the Guardian reported that “Israel has quietly stopped designating areas of Gaza as humanitarian zones” after breaking the ceasefire. Nowhere in Gaza can be considered safe now. People have been trapped inside a killing field.
Look at the recent shocking drone shots published by Israeli media of the “aid” checkpoints set up by Israel. Look at the starving caged Palestinians surrounded by people who seem to be American military contractors and Israeli soldiers, waiting to receive “aid” via a dystopian scheme that has horrified the UN and humanitarians. This is not aid. It is occupation.
Look at these pictures. Really look at them. If you still believe that all this is justifiable, that you are not bearing witness to crimes against humanity, then look at yourself. Ask yourself what you have become.
