On Friday Israel dropped another set of leaflets on Gaza. Israel’s use of leaflets for its psychological torture of the besieged Palestinian population is well known in these genocidal days.
Ominous, gloating, taunting, and sadistic messaging is the lingua franca of these leaflets, which Israel claims is a humanitarian effort to evacuate the civilian population. Some of the most common leaflet content are calls to contact Israel’s secret service with information on Hamas or the Israeli hostages. The purpose of these particular leaflets is twofold: coercion of protected civilians to obtain information (which is a violation of the law of armed conflict); but most of all, to undermine the trust and cohesion of a community under siege and annihilation.
Friday’s leaflets took the intel-gathering genre to another level, when the army included messaging of extortion and a list of children, among them toddlers as targets, with the threat to reveal personal information, such as criminal records, extramarital affairs, and queer identities. ….more
