Words Kill – Why Israel Gets Away with Murder in Gaza and Lebanon

The Israeli army's official version of why it attacked civilian areas during the intense and deadly bombardment in southern Lebanon on September 20 is that the Lebanese are hiding long-range rocket launchers in their own homes.

This official statement by the Israeli military was intended to justify the killing of 492 people and the wounding of 1,645 in a single day of Israeli attacks.

This ready-made explanation will stay with us throughout Israel's war in Lebanon, however long it lasts. The Israeli media is now heavily citing these claims, and more broadly, US and Western media are following suit.

Keep that in mind when you reflect on Israeli President Isaac Herzog's previous statements on October 13, when he argued that there were no civilians in Gaza and that “an entire nation is responsible out there.”

Israel does this in every war it wages against a Palestinian or Arab nation. Instead of removing civilians and civilian infrastructure from its targets, it immediately makes civilians the main target of its war.

A quick look at the number of civilians killed in Gaza's ongoing war and genocide should be enough to show that Israel targets ordinary people as a matter of course.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, children and women make up the largest proportion of war victims at 69 percent. When we consider the number of adult men killed – a number that includes doctors, paramedics, civil defense personnel and numerous other categories – it becomes clear that the vast majority of all victims in Gaza are civilians.

Only the Israeli media and its allies in the West continue to find justifications for why Palestinian civilians, and now Lebanese, are being killed in large numbers.

Compare the following two statements by Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari that received widespread media attention regarding both Gaza and Lebanon.

“Hamas systematically uses hospitals to wage war and consistently uses the people of Gaza as human shields,” Hagari said March 25.

Then “Hezbollah's terror headquarters was deliberately constructed beneath residential buildings in the heart of Beirut as part of Hezbollah's strategy to deploy human shields,” he said on September 27.

For those who give Hagari the benefit of the doubt, just take a look at what happened in Gaza last year.

For example, Israel claimed that the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital massacre was not of its own making and that it was a Palestinian rocket that killed the nearly 500 displaced refugees and injured hundreds more on October 17.

All evidence, including research by respected human rights groups, came to the opposite conclusion. Nevertheless, the false Israeli claims received widespread media attention.

The episode at Baptist Hospital was repeated several times. In fact, the lies began on October 7, not October 17, when Israel made claims about beheaded babies and mass rape. Although much of this has been conclusively proven false, some media outlets and pro-Israel officials continue to talk about it as established fact.

And although a Hamas headquarters has never been found beneath Al-Shifa Hospital, the baseless Israeli claims continue to be repeated as if they were the complete truth.

The same logic is now being applied to Lebanon, where Israel claims that it does not target civilians and that if civilians are killed, the Lebanese themselves should be held responsible for allegedly using civilians as human shields.

The Gaza playbook is now the Lebanon playbook. Of course, many play along, not because they are irrational or unable to draw correct conclusions based on the obvious evidence. They do this because they are part of the Israeli narrative and are not neutral storytellers or honest reporters.

Even organizations like the BBC are part of this narrative, using Israeli claims as a starting point for any conversation about Palestine or Lebanon. For example, “Israel said it had carried out a wave of preemptive strikes in southern Lebanon to thwart a large-scale missile and drone attack by Hezbollah,” the BBC reported on August 26.

Israel is getting away with its lies surrounding the mass killings in Gaza and now, unfortunately, Lebanon, because Israeli propaganda is welcomed, even embraced, by Western officials and journalists.

When U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described the September 20 airstrikes on Lebanon as “justice,” he was indicating to the mainstream media that their reporting should continue to be guided by this official assessment.

Imagine the outrage if the tables were turned, with thousands of Israeli civilians slaughtered in their own homes by Lebanese bombs. There would be no need to dwell on the US or Western media reactions as this should be obvious to anyone paying attention.

Lebanon is a sovereign Arab state. Gaza is an occupied territory and its people are protected by the Fourth Geneva Convention. Neither the lives of the Lebanese nor the Palestinians are worthless, and their mass murder should not take place for any reason, especially not on the basis of outright lies from an Israeli military spokesman.

Perpetuating Israeli lies is dangerous, not only because truth-telling is a virtue, but also because words kill and dishonest reporting can actually be used to justify genocide.