OUR DAILY THREAD: The Gaza Model
Genocidal tactics
THE SET-UP: “As soon as I heard the strike, I put my hand on my head and shouted, 'Sara! Sara! My family!' I knew they were gone."
Sara was Hussein Saleh’s five year-old daughter. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike less than a week into the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran. But she wasn’t in Iran. She, her father and her pregnant mother were among the estimated one million Lebanese displaced by Israel’s concurrent war on Lebanon.
According to a bubble-piercing report by The National, the family fled their home in the ancient city of Tyre when Israel targeted their neighborhood. Saleh took them to the relative safety of his uncle’s home, which was located near Tyre’s famous Roman hippodrome and barracks for the Lebanese army. He thought they would be insulated from the IDF’s onslaught.
Then he heard an explosion while out buying food for that evening’s iftar, the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. He rushed back to find a crater where his uncle’s home once stood. He also found his daughter’s decapitated head “amid the rubble”:
“When I picked up her head, everything changed,” he said, speaking softly and slowly, still trying to make sense of the deaths. “Something in my heart broke and went silent. I was no longer myself. I stopped crying.”
Two Israeli missiles also killed Saleh’s pregnant wife. And his uncle Hassan. And Hassan’s wife, Fatima. And their two children, Roqaya and Zein. His two aunts, Samira and Khadija, joined the others in a mass grave. That’s eight members of one family killed in the same attack on one house in a neighborhood he thought was safe. Meanwhile, the home they evacuated at the IDF’s behest remains standing. Saleh doesn’t think that’s accidental or coincidental:
“The Israelis know everything. They knew there were children and women in this house. And yet, they still targeted it.”
Of course, the IDF claims it never “intentionally” targets civilians, let alone entire families. But during the war on Gaza, three separate investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters and NPR all found a staggering number of nuclear and extended families wiped out by IDF bombs and missiles. In some cases, sprawling extended families were decimated and entire bloodlines were essentially exterminated.
To wit, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call back in 2024 exposed the family-killing tendencies of the IDF’s “Lavender” artificial intelligence targeting system:
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
The takeaway then was clear. Israel intentionally targeted families. It also targeted Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. Water treatment plants and hospitals and schools … it seemed nothing or no one was off-limits. Not even medical responders. I argued last year that IDF’s rules of engagement not only rendered the Geneva Conventions null and void, but they fostered genocidal tactics. In the case of the extended families often wiped out in one attack on a residential building, it even came close to wiping out entire family genetic lines. Here’s AP from 2024:
An Associated Press investigation identified at least 60 Palestinian families where at least 25 people were killed — sometimes four generations from the same bloodline — in bombings between October and December, the deadliest and most destructive period of the war.
Nearly a quarter of those families lost more than 50 family members in those weeks. Several families have almost no one left to document the toll, especially as documenting and sharing information became harder.
…and a list of the families killed en masse:
The Mughrabi family: more than 70 were killed in a single Israeli airstrike in December. The Abu Najas: over 50 were killed in October strikes, including at least two pregnant women. The large Doghmush clan lost at least 44 members in a strike on a mosque; AP documented over 100 family members killed in following weeks. By the spring, over 80 members of the Abu al-Qumssan family were killed.
That was as-of June of 2024 in Gaza. Now fast-forward to Lebanon today where Hussein Saleh’s family joined a similar list:
Eight members of Nahla family in Kfarhatta; eight of the Hamdan family in Al Nimiriya; six of the Basma family in Nabatieh; six of the Abd Al Sattar family in Baalbek; and eight of the Salehs in Tyre – all were killed without warning in Israeli attacks as its invasion of south Lebanon advances in what it calls a bid to create a “security zone” that would keep Hezbollah away from the border.
Israel is completely rogue, now … and, as the New York Times reported, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz isn’t even hiding it:
Mr. Katz said the destruction of Lebanese border towns would follow the Israeli “model” employed in parts of Gaza, where large areas were flattened and depopulated during the country’s two-year war with Hamas….
“Flattened and depopulated.”
It’s a model. Models require planning and adjustments. Decisions have to be made along the way by people with authority. In this case the decisions added-up to ethnically cleansing a territory by targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Katz states it bluntly, too. He doesn’t bother with rationalizations. Instead, Katz publicly confirmed that depopulation was Israeli government policy in Gaza. And we’re watching it being implemented yet again in Lebanon (as opposed to “Never Again”).
No, Israel obviously doesn’t feel it has to pretend anymore. Not after getting away with it in Gaza. And certainly not now that Trump joined-in with his own genocidal threats. Like Bibi’s Biblical references to the divinely-directed extermination of an entire people, Trump’s call to wipe out a civilization may mark a high-point in the history of American hypocrisy, at least in the realm of foreign policy.
After all, isn’t the call to “wipe a nation off the map” one of the reasons why Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon”?
And if Secretary Of “War” Pete Hegseth said:
“Crazy regimes like Iran hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions cannot have nuclear weapons. It’s common sense.”
Then what are we to make, then, of commanders in his prayer-based Pentagon sending this message on their way to war:
“President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
But we need to kill the religious fanatics in Tehran who, unlike Trump and Netanyahu, do not have nuclear weapons and have not bombed or invaded multiple countries, nor have they military power to do to anyone what the US and Israel have been doing to them and Lebanon under the guise of protecting ‘Western Civilization,” even as they transgress the very values they claim to defend.
It’s one of the more dangerous forms of hypocrisy and, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed, it has a way of consuming the hypocrite:
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
Like Israel, we have found the monster and it is us. - jp
The deadliest 10 minutes in decades: Lebanese reel from Israeli strikes that killed hundreds
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/09/lebanon-beirut-israel-strikes-hundreds-killed
Hospitals in Beirut struggle to deal with casualties after Israeli attacks
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/9/hospitals-in-beirut-struggle-to-deal-with-casualties-after-israeli-attacks
UN castigates massive wave of Israel strikes in Lebanon
https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/04/un-castigates-massive-wave-of-israel-strikes-in-lebanon/
European Leaders Demand That U.S. Cease-Fire With Iran Include Lebanon
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/world/middleeast/european-demands-iran-us-cease-fire-lebanon.html
Israel’s War in Lebanon Has Not Stopped
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/israels-war-in-lebanon-has-not-stopped
Toledo’s Lebanese community voices fear, frustration as Israel intensifies strikes on Lebanon
https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/toledo-lebanese-community-voices-fear-frustration-as-israel-intensifies-strikes-on-lebanon/512-fc9bc539-b490-4e09-8ab7-0e2747c6a943
Chicago woman fears for family in Lebanon amid continued Israeli attacks
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/sahar-dika-chicago-woman-family-lebanon-israeli-attacks/