Iran as Gaza

While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the first few days of Israel’s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel’s own estimate of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly dropped just under five hundred bombs a day.

According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the number of targets struck, the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit around half as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).

Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century, outstripping Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia’s war on Ukraine — and even many wars of the last century.

As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.

The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been confirmed to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the bombing of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then dropped heavy bombs on entire residential buildings and destroyed whole residential blocks despite the obvious danger to civilians, burying ordinary Iranians under the rubble.

According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and schools, and a range of other civilian structures. That includes pharmacies, scores of police stations and other security sites, and the infrastructure used to pay officers, as well as a desalination plant that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old heritage sites. It has also targeted Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least three times since the start of the war, risking a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran’s other energy infrastructure.

Israel has bombed oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also targeted infrastructure crucial to Iran’s food supply and a cancer drug facility, as well as its steel production, critical to both the country’s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.

There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on artificial intelligence for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would start using massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.

This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites — these were all the hallmarks of Israel’s war on Gaza.

It’s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated — on the US side, it’s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians, threatening that “death and destruction from the sky all day long” would be visited on the country and warning that “the only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they’re gonna live.” Just a week ago, he literally prayed for God to “break the teeth of the ungodly” and bring “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” in this war.

Lebanon as Gaza

It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we’re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.

There the Israeli military has illegally been giving Lebanese civilians forced evacuation orders in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable 20 percent of Lebanon’s population. It plans to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon’s territory as a “buffer zone,” for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents — though not before Israeli soldiers gleefully loot the homes first.

In the process, Israel has been seemingly deliberately targeting Lebanese health care workers and journalists, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it killed across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used white phosphorus over residential areas.

All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel’s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including attacks on health care facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like power plants, water and sanitation sites, and the agricultural land it relies on to produce food.

Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this, pointing to their actions in Gaza to explain their war plans in Lebanon and even invoking Israel’s genocidal destruction of the territory as a threat. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces’ conduct in Gaza — that they had killed a classroom’s worth of children every day, according to the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) — is almost the exact same statistic the deputy chief of UNICEF just used to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.

We Are All Gaza Now

What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.

This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty — as we are seeing with Iran’s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden cries from neocons and Israeli officials that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.

Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They’re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they’re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans’ food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they’re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don’t even like.

The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.