Money will not erase Israeli war crimes
By Connor Lālea Hampton, October 28, 2025
Millions of dollars are being spent on rebranding Israel’s war crimes, yet people still say the world is biased against them, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
The war room is getting hotter, and the Israeli government is sweating out judgment day. Israel is beginning to see heavy legal and humanitarian pushback for its war crimes and is no longer polling well with American youth.
So, Israel allocated an additional $150 million for public relations and to make deals with social media platforms in March 2024. It hired AI chat bots to flood social media platforms with pro-Israeli content and has paid influencers $7,000 per post.
Large sums of money are used for advocacy every day. I’ll tell you where I draw the line: trying to rewrite history so you can keep killing civilians.
Some would call me Hamas because I accept and spread what journalists, scholars and humanitarian organizations have said about what’s happened in Palestine. But that’s not how oppression works.
Thousands of civilians in Palestine have died, either by direct acts of violence or starvation by Israel. If they haven’t died, they’ve been tortured in camps, or forced to leave their homes with little food or water.
Because these facts are true, Israel’s propaganda will shift to two different ideologies. One, killing everyone is a good thing. It’s worth it. Every civilian in Palestine is a terrorist. Two, everybody else is lying or exaggerating about what Israel is doing.
And that’s exactly the rhetoric we’ve seen from Israel over the past two years.
“It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” said President of Israel Isaac Herzog. “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
Herzog argued all Palestinians are complicit in the actions of Hamas, but Palestinians don’t control Hamas the same way Israelis don’t control Israel. Palestinians do not overwhelmingly support or vote for Hamas, and even so, civilians are not combatants.
An Israeli Knesset member said, “The children of Gaza brought it upon themselves.”
Over half of Gaza’s population is under 18 and had no say in what actions Hamas takes. Targeting or blaming civilians, especially children, to justify collective punishment is a war crime under international humanitarian law. These are kids who want to go to school and live with their families. No child brings death and starvation upon themself.
The Israeli Minister of Defense said the government is “fighting human animals.”
This is textbook dehumanization that justifies violence and again is another war crime. Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention protects humane treatment for civilians without prejudice.
There is no exaggeration about what Israel is doing. They have been directly involved in the death of at least 64,000 Palestinians, although the number could be as high as 680,000 according to some experts who are counting the number of deaths through starvation.
One of the only reasons why it’s been so difficult to use genocide as a legal term against Israel, either journalistically or in court, is because it can be exceedingly difficult to prove intent. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims they have taken such extreme military action in self-defense against Hamas.
“We can’t leave these threats for the next generation,” Netanyahu said. “If we don’t act now, there will not be another generation. If we don’t act now, we simply won’t be here.”
This excuse has been used time after time to justify extreme violence, and while intent is nowhere to be found, Israel’s targets continue to be 248 journalists and 20,000 children. These killings contradict any self-defense claim and instead sound like an excuse to punish an entire population.
There will always be an excuse not to do the right thing, but as bystanders, we must have enough media literacy to call criminal activity by its name and refuse to look away.
It is a lie that we need to kill this many civilians in Palestine. We are far past a legitimate self-defense excuse. This is a pattern of war crimes enabled by countries like the United States, which also has a past of excusing itself of wrongdoing, like in Iraq.
There is no bias against Israel or an antisemitic plot against people who are Jewish. There is a moral disdain for a government that is breaking international law and justifying it by lying.
Just because a government can come up with an excuse to commit war crimes does not make it the victim. We can’t let our governments rebrand people, crime or history just so they won’t have to admit they’ve done the wrong thing.
Feature graphic courtesy of Connor Lālea Hampton
