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Israel’s war on Gaza is not just physical — it’s neurological. This visual renders the nervous system under siege: empathy frayed, grief surveilled, trust weaponized. A child reaches for memory as drones mimic care. The assault is intimate, algorithmic, and global. Photo: Medium/File photo.
By Rima Najjar – Oct 27, 2025
Author’s Note
Israel’s war in Gaza is an assault on the nervous system itself. This essay documents how Israel weaponizes fundamental human reflexes — empathy, grief, trust, the instinct to survive — to engineer Palestinian societal collapse. It does so by dismantling perception, using cloned voices, fraudulent maps, and mimicked care to bait, betray, and sabotage. Palestinians are resisting through a collective project: to protect empathy, to sanctify grief, and to safeguard identity against Israel’s systematic assault targeting the very bedrock of human connection.
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Israel’s Neurotoxin: A War on Reflex, Grief and Trust
It is almost impossible to comprehend what Israel has done and continues to do in Gaza at so many levels. I am not talking here about the atrocities of mass killing and total destruction of infrastructure, which have been streamed to the world in pixelated horror and euphemized headlines. I want to talk about the psychological tactics Israel uses to collapse the very nervous system of Palestinians — Israel’s neurotoxin that targets empathy, grief, and trust as primary objectives in a war designed to unmake perception itself.
Israel’s intent is chillingly clear: to manipulate emotion, to shatter the very reflexes that make collective endurance possible, and to render the act of caring, fleeing, mourning, or believing not just futile but fatal.
Israel’s assault is not merely a war of bombs and bulldozers. It is a war on the nervous system of a people — a campaign that refines historical psychological warfare tactics and mutates them through digital precision, real-time surveillance, and algorithmic cruelty.
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 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 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
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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.
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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.
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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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The Global Dimension
Israel’s psychological warfare does not end at the border of Gaza. It extends into the global nervous system. It scripts horror, then punishes those who question it. It fabricates atrocity, then monopolizes grief. It weaponizes trauma, then rewrites memory. The inversion is total: the occupier becomes the victim, the resistance becomes the monster, and the lie becomes the only thing remembered.
This, too, is part of Israel’s assault on the Palestinian nervous system. It does not just collapse the reflexes of those under siege — it rewires the perceptions of those watching. The same tactics used to bait Gazans into kill zones are used to bait the world into complicity. The cloned voice that mimics a UN worker has a twin: the official statement that mimics truth. The interactive map that guides civilians into bombs has a twin: the media narrative that guides audiences into forgetting.
Israel argues that Hamas engages in a “propaganda war,” using civilian suffering as a strategy and controlling the narrative to cast Israel as the sole aggressor. Some pro-Israel analysts claim Hamas has achieved “psychological success” by portraying itself as the victim, turning military losses into narrative wins on the global stage.
But this framing relies on unverified claims and collapses under scrutiny. Hamas has repeatedly denied the Israeli allegations of atrocities on October 7th. On October 10th, 2023, it released a video statement rejecting accusations of rape and child murder. “These actions are against Islam,” the spokesperson said. “We do not target civilians. We fight occupation.” Hamas called for an independent international investigation. Israel refused.
Few know that Israel blocked access to a full UN expert inquiry into the rape allegations. It permitted only a limited review — no fieldwork, no access to Gaza, no interviews with Palestinian witnesses. The investigators spoke only to individuals pre-selected by the Israeli government. The result was not a report — it was a script.
Few know that Hamas, unlike Israel, has repeatedly called for international oversight. In December 2023, it invited the UN, the ICC, and independent journalists to investigate the events of October 7th. Israel responded by bombing press offices in Gaza and revoking visas for foreign reporters. The message was clear: the truth is a threat.
Israel does not merely distort facts — it engineers perception, it rewrites the screams of the oppressed. And in doing so, it ensures that the world remembers not the drone that mimicked a baby’s cry, not the map that led to a bomb, not the voice that betrayed — but the story it told about Hamas.
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Diaspora, Fused
This resistance is not confined to Gaza. The Palestinian diaspora — scattered across Amman, Berlin, Santiago, Dearborn — is actively countering the assault on perception that reaches them through Western media. In July 2025, diaspora-led coalitions launched coordinated campaigns to archive testimonies, amplify Gazan voices, and challenge disinformation. Organizations like Global Ties and Demac mobilized relief efforts, digital storytelling platforms, and legal advocacy networks. “When they distort Gaza, they distort us,” said a Palestinian organizer in London. “We are not just watching — we are intervening.”
Because this is not just a case of narrative versus narrative. It is something far more visceral. Israel’s psychological warfare does not merely argue — it interferes. It mimics trusted voices to bait civilians into kill zones. It weaponizes maps that look humanitarian but lead to airstrikes. It floods the nervous system with false signals, forcing people to doubt their own instincts. This is not propaganda — it is perceptual sabotage.
And the diaspora feels it too. The same assault that collapses trust in Gaza reaches them through headlines, algorithms, and smear campaigns like “Pallywood” that discredit even the act of witnessing. The lie is not just spoken — it is engineered to override the truth, to make empathy suspect, to make grief look staged. Palestinians are not just resisting a false story. They are resisting the engineered collapse of meaning itself.
This is how they withstand the assault: by refusing to let Israel’s sabotage of perception become the final draft. They rewire the nervous system not through technology, but through testimony. They restore instinct not through safety, but through solidarity. They protect empathy by making it visible. They mourn in fragments. They trust in whispers. They endure not because the assault is bearable — but because the truth must outlive the lie.
Psychologists call this identity fusion — a phenomenon where personal and collective identity become inseparable, so that an insult to the group is felt as an insult to the self. In Gaza, this fusion is not theoretical — it is lived. When Israel bombs a school, it does not just destroy a building. It wounds the memory of every child who learned there, every parent who believed in it. When it targets journalists, it does not just silence a voice. It fractures the communal act of witnessing. Palestinians do not endure as isolated individuals. They endure as fused selves — where survival is not just personal, but historical, familial, and ideological.
This resilience unfolds within what scholars call psychological asymmetry — a condition where one side possesses overwhelming technological power, while the other possesses overwhelming emotional coherence. Israel’s arsenal may dominate the battlefield, but it cannot dominate the nervous system of a people fused by memory, grief, and resistance. The asymmetry is not just military — it is perceptual. Israel engineers collapse. Palestinians engineer meaning.
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How Palestinians Withstand the Assault on Perception
How in the world are Palestinians — especially in Gaza — withstanding Israel’s assault at this fundamental level of instinct and perception?
They are doing so through a kind of resilience that defies clinical language. It is not just psychological endurance. It is perceptual reconstruction. It is the refusal to let Israel’s sabotage of empathy, grief, and trust become permanent.
In October 2025, Gaza is gasping for breath. Its skyline is broken. Its soil is layered with grief. Yet inside displacement camps, families still gather for prayer. Children still play with handmade dolls. A mother in Gaza City told Middle East Eye, “We teach our children to name the stars. We tell them the sky is still ours.” This is not denial — it is reclamation. Palestinians are reasserting perception against the machinery of collapse.
Journalists, despite hunger and trauma, continue to document their own destruction. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 2024 was the deadliest year ever recorded for the press, with nearly 70% of journalists killed worldwide targeted by Israel in Gaza. Yet local reporters persist. “We write so the world cannot say it didn’t know,” said one displaced journalist to the Tehran Times. The act of witnessing becomes an act of survival.
Mental health professionals, many displaced themselves, are rebuilding Gaza’s psychological infrastructure from within. A World Health Organization initiative launched in October 2025 trains non-specialists to recognize and respond to trauma. “We cannot wait for the siege to end,” said psychiatrist Samah Jabr. “We must treat the nervous system while it is still under fire.” Clinics now integrate trauma care into primary health services, even in tents and rubble.
Studies published this year show that despite staggering rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression, Palestinians in Gaza exhibit high levels of identity resilience and life meaning. A research team from An-Najah National University found that university students in Gaza, even after two years of war, continue to articulate purpose, dignity, and historical continuity. “We are not just surviving,” one student said. “We are remembering who we are.”
This is how Palestinians withstand the assault: by refusing to let Israel’s sabotage of perception become the final draft. They rewire the nervous system not through technology, but through testimony. They restore instinct not through safety, but through solidarity. They protect empathy by making it visible. They mourn in fragments. They trust in whispers. They endure not because the assault is bearable — but because the truth must outlive the lie.
(Medium)
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
