War, Propaganda, and the Spectacle of Suffering
The war in Gaza is not only fought with drones, tunnels, and rockets; it is fought with cameras. It is fought through livestreams, tweets, and NGO reports. This is no longer HUMINT in the traditional sense. HUMINT—human intelligence—once belonged to the world of spooks, agents, secrets, and whispers. Today, human intelligence is filmed on smartphones, edited for emotional punch, and consumed by millions. It’s no longer intelligence; it’s entertainment. It has become HUMENT—human entertainment—where suffering itself is curated, packaged, and broadcast.
The NGOs, aid workers, and reporters on the ground claim neutrality, but in this war there is no neutral. They are soft spooks, narrative operatives shaping perception rather than just gathering facts. Their images and testimonies are intelligence with emotional payloads, designed to move hearts as much as inform minds. Their cameras don’t just document—they weaponize.
And in the feed economy, atrocity is a product. The crying child, the drone shot over rubble, the weeping mother—these are not just moments; they are content, scored with violins, cut to viral lengths, consumed by a global audience that toggles between outrage and voyeurism. War becomes a show. Horror becomes a series. The old Broadway line rings bitterly true: “Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle, and they’ll never catch wise.” Every side knows this. Every side plays it. Gaza is not just a battlefield—it is a broadcast.
Meanwhile, famine in Gaza isn’t incidental—it’s strategic. Hunger has always been a weapon of war, from medieval sieges to modern blockades. Cut off resources, break morale, force surrender. Israel denies the worst accusations but uses siege tactics knowingly. Hamas, in turn, thrives on the imagery of starvation, using suffering as both shield and symbol. Civilians are crushed in the middle. The world argues over semantics—“unconditional ceasefire” versus “unconditional surrender”—but the bombs keep falling. Mercy, in war, only comes after surrender.
Think of it as the classic trope: two knights fight under the king’s gaze. One is wounded, knocked down, but refuses to yield. The king cannot spare a knight who will not ask for mercy. Mercy only follows surrender. Germany and Japan survived because they surrendered unconditionally. Gaza, like the Black Knight in Monty Python, fights on even as it’s hacked to pieces, shouting defiance through the blood. Heroic, perhaps, but suicidal.
And Gaza stands alone. The Arab world mouths support but offers no jets, no armies. Egypt seals its borders. Jordan stays quiet. The Gulf states normalize ties with Israel. Iran uses Gaza as leverage, not liberation. Two billion Muslims, half a billion Arabs, and no cavalry comes. The West tweets, marches, and protests, but it bets on Israel. Gaza bleeds. The cameras roll.
This is the grim reality: wars end when one side surrenders. Gaza hasn’t surrendered. Israel won’t stop. The world won’t intervene. The suffering continues, endlessly looped, endlessly consumed. In this war, truth is secondary to narrative. Human pain is no longer just experienced; it’s performed, shared, and monetized.
HUMINT has collapsed into HUMENT. Intelligence has become entertainment. Horror has become spectacle. The curtain rises daily. The violins swell. The thumb hovers in the air. And the show goes on.
