THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN ROTI AND DAL . BREAD AND BUTTER
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:49
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As in Gaza, residents say Israel is waging psychological warfare on civilian life and its soundscape
In the southern Lebanese village of Habboush, the sound that cut through the stillness of the night was not an air strike. It was the sound of a child screaming for help.
Hashem, a paramedic in the village, heard the cries coming from an Israeli quadcopter hovering overhead.
Speaking to Middle East Eye, he said this was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern that has become increasingly familiar to residents who remain in southern villages.
“This is not the first time these drones have flown over us and broadcast different sounds,” Hashem said.
“Yesterday, it was the sound of children screaming and pleading for help. Before that, they broadcast the sound of an ambulance. Another time it was the Quran. Another time, it was the voice of a woman calling for help. We are living through this almost every day.”
For people who have decided to stay in their homes in south Lebanon despite Israeli occupation and daily bombardment, Israeli quadcopters have become a constant presence in the sky.
They surveil, issue warnings, broadcast messages and sounds, and turn the night into a psychological battlefield.
Residents and first responders say that beyond intimidation, Israeli forces use the distress sounds to lure people out of their homes or shelters, whether through fear, curiosity or the instinct to help.
Hashem said the first reaction to hearing such sounds is almost automatic.
“When you hear these voices in the silence of the night, your first instinct is to go outside and see what is happening,” he said. “That is what happened to me yesterday. But I quickly realised that it had to be coming from the drone, because it was impossible for there to be children in the village at that time, especially around midnight.”
He believes the aim is partly to spread fear among those who remain in the villages and push them to leave after exhausting them psychologically. But he also sees another, more immediate, purpose.
“Given that many villages are now empty of civilians, with only resistance fighters remaining in some areas, I think the goal may also be to lure someone out and identify them,” Hashem said.
The tactic is not new in Israel’s recent wars.
In Gaza, rights groups, journalists and residents have documented the use of Israeli quadcopters equipped with loudspeakers to broadcast the sounds of crying children, screaming women and calls for help in residential areas and refugee camps, particularly at night.
'When you hear these voices in the silence of the night, your first instinct is to go outside and see what is happening'
- Hashem, paramedic
Residents in Gaza said the sounds sometimes led people to believe that civilians nearby were in distress, only for them to realise that the cries were coming from small drones hovering above their neighbourhoods.
In Gaza, quadcopters were not only tools of surveillance. Throughout the war, doctors, residents and rights organisations reported their use above streets, homes and hospitals, where they were deployed to monitor movement, issue orders, intimidate civilians and, in some cases, open fire.
Their use with loudspeakers became part of a broader form of psychological warfare: confusing civilians, blurring the line between real and recorded sounds, and undermining one of the most basic human instincts – the impulse to respond to a cry for help.
Today, residents in south Lebanon say they are seeing elements of that same method transferred to their villages, albeit in a different setting. Their towns have been destroyed or nearly deserted, families caught between displacement and temporary return, and a war that has reshaped the relationship between people, sound and movement.
Tarek Mazaani, from the devastated southern town of Houla, knows that pressure first-hand. His home was destroyed during the 2024 war. He later moved to Zawtar al-Sharqiya during the ceasefire, before renewed fighting in March displaced him again.
During that period, Mazaani founded the Gathering of the People of the Southern Border Towns, a group that campaigned for residents’ right to return to their destroyed villages and for reconstruction to begin.
On 12 October 2025, he says, the Israeli army sent quadcopters over several southern villages, broadcasting warning messages that called on residents not to speak to him and to boycott him. The messages accused him of belonging to Hezbollah.
Mazaani recalled the incident while displaced yet again, speaking from what had become his third displacement. The home where he had taken refuge in Zawtar al-Sharqiya has also since been destroyed, he told MEE.
“When the Israeli army did that, I had to leave the house out of concern for the lives of the residents and neighbours in the residential complex where I was staying,” Mazaani said. “I felt they could target me after those messages. I left my family and went somewhere else.”
He said the warnings later stopped after his case became a matter of public concern, was covered by several international media outlets, and drew statements of solidarity from senior official figures.
But for Mazaani, the impact of the incident went beyond his own safety. Broadcasting his name over southern villages, he said, was a message to the community around him as much as it was a message to him: anyone active on the issue of return, anyone challenging displacement, or anyone demanding reconstruction could be marked, threatened or socially isolated.
The testimonies of Hashem and Mazaani reveal another layer of the war in south Lebanon. It is not only a war of air strikes, destruction and displacement, but also of control over the psychological and sonic landscape of civilian life.
This use of sound places civilians in an impossible position. Responding may mean walking into a trap; ignoring it may mean turning away from a genuine cry for help. Between these possibilities, fear accumulates, trust erodes,and remaining in the village becomes a daily battle of nerves.
In south Lebanon, where the long memory of occupation intersects with renewed displacement, these quadcopters are seen as more than just military technology. They are experienced as extension of Israeli control: hovering overhead, watching, projecting disembodied voices, and forcing residents to question every sound and movement around them.
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:42
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Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow, Monash University
It’s well documented that news media influences our behaviour in all manner of ways, from how much meat we buy to our attitudes towards exercise.
Journalism does not merely hold a mirror up to reality, as some have argued. It creates versions of reality. With every decision of which story to include and exclude, which image to show or not show, even which grammatical choice is made, our impressions are sculpted. This is especially the case with the Israel-Gaza war.
Research has shown, for example, that exposure to news media can induce Islamophobia. There’s also evidence of historical news media bias against Palestinians and Muslims.
As the leading organisation tracking and tackling Islamophobia in Australia through its digital reporting platform, the Islamophobia Register Australia commissioned this research to assess whether there was media imbalance in the present-day coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. Our analysis found a pro-Israel bias across the surveyed outlets.
Read more: How Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism are manufactured through disinformation
The impact news media can have on our attitudes became especially pertinent when the Israel–Gaza war began on October 7 2023, and with it, sustained media coverage. From that date, reports of antisemitism in Australia increased 738% and Islamophobia increased 1,300%.
Australians brought their concerns to the Islamophobia Register Australia as anti-Palestinian racism is a specific and documented form of Islamophobia.
Our analysis was a focused, introductory study with the aim of looking for disparities in reporting on the Israel-Gaza war on the Instagram accounts of six of Australia’s most followed news outlets: ABC News, The Daily Aus, The Australian, News.com.au, 9News and The Daily Telegraph. We looked at their posts on the topic between October 7 and November 7 2023. We chose Instagram as the field of analysis, as the latest global research found social media is the main way people of all ages come across news online.
These outlets span commercial and publicly owned, legacy media and new media, digital-only and print-based, and national and state-based media. Outlets also needed to have more than 100,000 followers on their verified Instagram account. The amount of posts assessed varied depending on how many each outlet had posted. News.com.au had only four posts in the time period, while ABC News had published 63.
This is not a definitive analysis of potential bias in the Australian media. Its scope is small and doesn’t account for the outlets’ reporting on the Israel-Gaza war more broadly. This report is, however, an initial look that highlights some common areas of imbalance or inequality in the current approach.
We focused on language because it’s part of the “covert operations of war”. While we assessed all posts about the conflict during the time period (not just posts with an explicit human angle), we measured them on how humanising they were because of the known impact it has on the way audiences interpret conflict.
One specific tool we developed to assess the treatment of people in coverage was what we called the “humanising test”. To meet a minimum standard of humanising coverage, news outlets’ Instagram posts needed to include at least two of the three following criteria in their mentions of Israelis and Palestinians:
provide at least a first name for the person
show their face, and/or
use at least some of their own words (translations were ok).
This test appears easy to pass. Outlets only needed a single post that met the criteria to be successful. However, only one of the six accounts passed the test for Palestinians, while five of the six passed for Israelis.
Five of the six news media accounts did not include a single post that passed the humanising test about Palestinians. ABC News was the only account to provide any posts about Palestinians that passed. The Australian had ten posts about Israelis that passed the humanising test, and not one post that passed the test for Palestinians.
We also investigated the use of “voice”, specifically the active, passive and middle voice.
While the distinction between active and passive voice may seem like something only your high school English teacher cares about, it matters a lot more than just clarifying prose. It highlights who an actor is in a sentence, which really matters in discussions about war.
Even more important is the less-discussed “middle voice”. The middle voice exists beyond the active and passive voice, and when used in a sentence, removes any possibility of an actor causing an event.
In an example from our study, a post by The Daily Telegraph is captioned “bombs are falling less than 100m from where [the family] are sheltering” on the Gaza strip.
Note the word “fall” used when discussing the “bombs falling” on the family. Using the word “fall” with “bomb” as opposed, for example, to “dropped”, signifies to the audience that there was no external agent involved in the bombing. If the word “dropped” had been used, even if using the passive voice without naming the Israeli army, there remains an understanding that somebody dropped the bombs, even if they are unnamed.
But this use of the middle voice by saying the bombs “fall” implies that the bombs fell spontaneously from the sky without human intervention, as if it were a natural phenomenon. There is no attribution as to where the bombs came from, nor who is responsible for their presence. Thus, even the suggestion of Israel as the agent of the bombs is erased in the mind of the audience.
The middle voice was never used for any posts about attacks on Israel, but was used by five of six accounts when reporting on attacks on Gaza.
Five (ABC News, 9News, The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and News.com.au) of six accounts showed bias against Palestinians in their use of the active, middle and passive voices. Meanwhile, all five accounts were more likely to use the active voice when discussing attacks against Israel. Overall, the passive voice was used more often to describe what was happening in Gaza than in Israel.
So what? you may think. But this is important, because these grammatical choices shepherd the audience – you and I – into a way of understanding the parties in the Israel-Gaza war.
Grammatical choices are more subtle than blatantly calling one side “the victim” or “human”, and the other side “the aggressor” and “inhuman”. Such framing therefore slips past the audience unnoticed, but creates a reflexive perception that lingers in the audience’s mind.
Subsequent analysis internationally has found Australian news media is not alone in its biased treatment against Palestinians. Analysis of the media in Canada and the United States found the same imbalance in language we identified.
The discrepancies and dehumanisation we and others have found are not merely semantic squabbles. Five of the six outlets we studied (all bar The Daily Aus) were unbalanced against Palestinians in their Instagram posts in at least one of the three categories we assessed (along with humanisation and grammar, we also looked at descriptive language).
The media’s reporting on the Israel-Gaza war matters because it shapes the way the audience views the people involved in the war. These perceptions are fostered online and can translate into the way Australians view and treat each other in real life.
Palestinian war victims are being systematically dehumanised by large and influential parts of the media to their substantial audiences. When the media is the primary prism through which people understand the war, it must be held to high standards, and to account.
https://theconversation.com/australian-medias-instagram-posts-on-gaza-war-have-an-anti-palestine-bias-that-has-real-world-consequences-221609?fbclid=IwY2xjawSVsvRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeu96LRFX5RDDkAIpXzXgFPY71A37RXZSUzK0xZdx8Go65EXPxodDx3N5TPdk_aem_7MTySGNxfmfZgZgxcgQ6Gg
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:28
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https://x.com/DanielLDavis1/status/2064537073919414689
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:16
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