Rima Najjar

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Empathy, the First Reflex

Empathy, the first reflex Israel weaponized, is no longer safe. In April 2024, Israeli quadcopters hovered over the Nuseirat refugee camp broadcasting the cries of infants and screaming women. Engineered sounds. Civilians, compelled by the instinct to protect, emerged from shelters only to be met with sniper fire or drone strikes. “We thought someone’s child was trapped,” one survivor told Al Mayadeen. “We ran toward the sound. Then the drone fired.” Israel turned the protective impulse into a death sentence, converting empathy into a tactical liability and care into a kill switch.

This was not isolated an isolated incident. In December 2024, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented Israeli drones broadcasting recordings of crying babies, women’s screams, and gunfire in the dark hours over central Gaza. “It was a baby, I swear,” said a man from Deir al-Balah. “We heard it all night. My wife begged me not to go. But I couldn’t ignore it.” He stepped outside. The drone fired. Israel baited the instinct to rescue, then punished it.

In June 2025, quadcopters returned — this time over displacement camps in southern Gaza. Witnesses reported hearing Hebrew lullabies and Arabic prayers, followed by sudden bursts of recorded chaos: sirens, explosions, children sobbing. “It was like they were trying to confuse our hearts,” said a grandmother in Khan Younis. “One moment it sounded like a child praying. The next, a woman screaming.” These were not psychological side effects — they were deliberate provocations. Israel did not just target Palestinian bodies. It targeted their instinct to care.

In some cases, drones entered homes uninvited, hovering silently before unleashing sound barrages or recording intimate moments. “It hovered over my baby’s crib,” one mother said. “It didn’t shoot. It just watched. Then it left.” The message was clear: nowhere is safe, not even the cradle.

In January 2025, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documented drones entering homes uninvited, recording intimate moments of sleeping families. “It hovered over my baby’s crib,” one mother said. “It didn’t shoot. It just watched. Then it left.” The message was clear: nowhere is safe, not even the cradle. Surveillance became intrusion. Intimacy became exposure.

Israel has turned empathy, once a source of strength, into an invitation to death. Its war on Gaza is not content with silencing voices — it mimics them. It does not merely kill — it impersonates the cry for help. In doing so, it rewires the moral circuitry of survival, making the act of compassion indistinguishable from a trap. To reach for the wounded, to answer a scream, to cradle a child — each becomes a calculated risk. Each gesture of care, a potential trigger. This is not just cruelty. It is the algorithmic inversion of mercy

Instinct to Flee, Sabotaged

Instinct, too, Israel sabotaged. In September 2025, Israeli forces dropped leaflets and sent mass SMS messages urging Gazans to evacuate to designated “safe zones.” These messages included QR codes linking to digital maps. Families followed the instructions. Warplanes bombed the destinations. A father in Rafah, interviewed before his death, said, “We believed them. We thought they wouldn’t bomb where they told us to go.” Israel poisoned the logic of survival, transforming the instinct to flee into a trap and collapsing the decision-making infrastructure that civilians rely on under siege.

This tactic is not isolated. In May 2024, Israeli drones dropped flyers over eastern Rafah, instructing residents to evacuate specific neighborhoods and follow mapped routes to a “humanitarian zone.” The IDF followed up with phone calls and text messages. “They told us which streets were safe,” a mother recounted to Al Jazeera. “We walked exactly where they said. Then the airstrike hit.” Israel did not just mislead — it choreographed movement, then punished it.

In December 2023, the Israeli military published an interactive map dividing Gaza into hundreds of numbered blocks, claiming it would help civilians avoid active combat zones. The map was embedded in leaflets and QR codes. “We studied the map all night,” said a teacher in Khan Younis. “We thought it was real. We moved our children block by block.” The next morning, artillery flattened the zone they had just entered. Israel turned cartography into a weapon, converting the instinct to navigate into a death sentence.

In February 2025, leaflets threatened forced displacement unless Gazans cooperated with Israeli directives. “The world map will not change if all the people of Gaza cease to exist,” one leaflet read. The message was not just coercive — it was existential. Israel reframed survival itself as conditional, contingent on obedience to the very force engineering collapse.

Israel sabotages instinct by flooding the nervous system with false signals — maps, messages, voices, coordinates — then punishing those who respond. The result is paralysis. Civilians cannot trust their own reflexes. To flee is to risk death. To stay is to risk death. Israel engineers the collapse of logic itself, making every decision a coin toss between annihilation and annihilation.

Trust, Weaponized

Trust, the final reflex, Israel does not merely betray — it weaponizes. In July 2025, families in Khan Younis received voice messages mimicking humanitarian agencies. The voice urged them to seek shelter in a nearby school. “It sounded like UN,” one woman told The Sudan Times. “We trusted it.” Within the hour, Israeli warplanes bombed the school. Israel did not just exploit the instinct to believe — it engineered the tone of care, the tone of protection, the architecture of humanitarian language, only to detonate it. Trust became a lure. A decoy. A prelude to annihilation.

In October 2024, deepfake videos circulated on Telegram and WhatsApp showing well-known Palestinian journalists urging evacuation to specific coordinates. The videos used real faces, real voices, real urgency. “I thought it was him,” a survivor said. “He’s never lied to us.” Families followed the instructions. Drones followed them. Israel contaminated the very infrastructure of trust — faces, voices, names — turning them into kill switches.

In July 2023, Israeli authorities declared a temporary ceasefire and opened a “humanitarian corridor” for civilians to flee northern Gaza. Thousands moved south. Hours later, airstrikes hit the corridor. “We believed them,” said a father from Beit Hanoun. “We thought they wouldn’t bomb where they told us to go.” Israel did not just break promises — it weaponized them.

This assault on trust extends beyond Gaza’s borders. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Israel has waged systematic campaigns to “discredit the professionalism of Palestinian journalists,” often through smear labels like “Gazawood” or “Pallywood.” These terms, amplified by official Israeli channels, frame Palestinian documentation of war crimes as staged or fake. The goal is not just to deny evidence — it is to collapse the credibility of those who bear witness by targeting the trust between the journalist and the world.

Israel targets the nervous system of a people by rewiring the signals it relies on — empathy, instinct, trust — and converting them into vectors of collapse. To trust is to risk obliteration. To doubt is to risk paralysis. This is the bind Israel engineers: a population forced to choose between the fatalism of belief and the vertigo of disbelief.

Grief, Desecrated

Grief, the reflex that binds the living to the dead, the final frontier of emotional survival, Israel desecrates and renders incoherent. In January 2025, Khaled Barakah buried his two sons alone. No procession. No condolences. “Who in Gaza hasn’t lost something?” he asked Safa News. “There is no room to mourn.”

In March 2025, families in Deir al-Balah reported drones hovering over cemeteries during burials. “It circled above my brother’s grave,” one man told Al Jazeera. “We rushed the prayer. We left before we could cry.” Israel turned the cemetery into a surveillance zone, the grave into a threat. The bereaved became suspects.

In November 2024, Israeli strikes targeted a funeral tent in Jabalia, killing mourners gathered to honor a slain medic. “We were praying,” said a survivor. “Then the roof fell.” The tent had no weapons. No fighters. Only grief. Israel did not mistake it — it selected it. The act of mourning became a military target.

In July 2024, a mother in Khan Younis kept her daughter’s body in a freezer for six days. “There was no safe place to bury her,” she said. “I couldn’t let her rot.” The war did not just kill — it delayed farewell. It froze grief in time. It denied the dead their dignity and the living their release.

In one widely reported case, another mother buried her infant daughter in her wedding dress — the only white cloth she had left. “There was no time, no shroud, no prayer,” she said. “Only dust and silence.”

Israel does not merely interrupt mourning — it criminalizes it. It turns grief into danger. Israel weaponizes mourning by making it visible, traceable, punishable. To cry is to risk being seen. To gather is to risk being bombed. To bury is to risk being followed.

The nervous system of Palestine does not just suffer loss — it suffers the impossibility of grieving it.

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Contextualizing the Tactics

Israel’s tactics do not emerge in a vacuum. They refine colonial precedents and mirror contemporary strategies. British forces in Kenya used loudspeakers to simulate distress during the Mau Mau uprising. French troops in Algeria relied on informants and aerial photography to fracture trust and isolate resistance. American psy-ops in Vietnam dropped leaflets promising safety that rarely materialized.

In 1947–48, zionist militias deployed psychological warfare to induce mass Palestinian flight. Loudspeakers mounted on armored vehicles broadcast recordings of women screaming, crying, and urging civilians to flee. These broadcasts were timed with attacks or rumors of impending massacres, amplifying terror and fracturing communal resolve. In villages like Deir Yassin, the massacre itself was followed by deliberate amplification — Zionist forces spread exaggerated accounts of brutality to neighboring towns, triggering panic and mass displacement. Historian Walid Khalidi and others have documented how these tactics — combining real violence with engineered fear — were central to Plan Dalet, the zionist blueprint for territorial consolidation. The goal was not just to clear land, but to collapse the psychological infrastructure of Palestinian presence.

Absent this history, Palestinians are often portrayed not as victims of psychological warfare — but as people who simply abandoned their homes. Zionist narratives, echoed in Western media and textbooks, frame the 1948 exodus as voluntary or strategic — claiming Palestinians fled at the urging of Arab leaders or out of cowardice. This framing persists even within Palestinian families. Younger generations, raised in exile, sometimes ask their elders: “Why did you leave?” The question carries pain — not because it seeks truth, but because it assumes betrayal.

Russian forces in Ukraine have deployed similar tactics: in 2022, Russian operatives circulated fake evacuation notices in Kherson, directing civilians toward mined roads and active combat zones. “We thought it was official,” one resident told The Kyiv Independent. “The logo looked real. The map was detailed. Then the shelling started.” Russia weaponized the instinct to flee, collapsing the logic of survival.

And Ukraine, too, has engaged in psychological operations. In 2023, Ukrainian forces reportedly used spoofed radio transmissions in occupied Melitopol to mimic Russian military orders, sowing confusion among troops and civilians alike. “We heard them say to evacuate,” a local resident told BBC Ukraine. “Some people packed and left. Others stayed. No one knew what was real.” The tactic disrupted Russian cohesion — but also fractured civilian trust. The line between resistance and manipulation blurred.

Israel’s model, however, is more intimate, more instantaneous, and more ideologically precise. It does not just echo colonial cruelty — it perfects it. Israel studies the colonial archive and the digital battlefield, then scripts its own doctrine of collapse not through brute force alone, but through emotional mimicry — by impersonating care, simulating safety, and weaponizing the very signals that once sustained survival.

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Via https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/10/27/israels-assault-on-the-nervous-system-of-palestine-weaponizing-empathy-grief-and-trust-to-engineer-collapse/