In the early months of the war on Gaza US foreign policy paid less attention to the war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians than the possibility that the war might spread into a regional conflagration. The US administrations (first Biden’s, then Trump’s) spent more time silencing condemnation of Israeli actions by bullying universities and international organizations, bribing foreign governments with sweet trade and military deals, and arresting critics at home than it did addressing its role in enabling the Israeli violence. This passed for “statecraft” and was celebrated in Washington as successful containment of the crisis.
This is the latest chapter in the hallucinatory worldscape the US has built for itself, where US aggression is reframed as defense, atrocities are dismissed as exceptions, and where US proxies, assassinations, and ethnic cleansings are never acknowledged. Maintaining the accompanying fiction that Gaza was successfully managed requires not only denial of the ongoing genocide but also of the regional destabilization unfolding. Gaza is not the cause, however, but one battlefield of the “wider war” that has been here for decades and now spills across new geographical, technical, and cultural fronts with dangerous new norms for all.
Gaza and the Global War on Terror
From the first weeks of the war in Gaza it was clear that Israel was expanding the war beyond its previous level of disproportionate local reprisals. For decades Israel has been engaged in displacing the Palestinian population through military, legal, and economic actions, and countering predictable Palestinian uprisings with brutal retaliation. 2023 revealed a new strategy. Instead of targeting family homes or known meeting sites of militants after the attacks of October 7, Israeli launched a methodical destruction of Gaza society as a whole. Universities, hospitals, utility infrastructure, and housing were systematically leveled, while the social structure was torn apart through constant displacements and more than 72,000 officially recorded deaths and tens of thousands missing. The desolate landscape left behind testifies to the way the war was “widened” from military targets to anything that moved, including the more than 20,000 children killed thus far.
Nor was the war confined to Gaza. The West Bank, already in crisis before October 7, has become a virtual war zone, as Israel troops stand by while settlers attack Palestinian communities. Israel has also launched strikes and ground operations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar, as well as carrying out maritime attacks in international waters. In Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian territories, Israel is not merely carrying out strikes but clearing villages, establishing military outposts, and openly discussing annexation.
Rather than criticizing or even acknowledging Israel’s expansion of the war, the US increased military aid to Israel and expanded its own wars. Earlier Global War on Terror (GWOT) arenas like Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya have suffered intensified action, while new US military operations in Africa, the Americas, and Iran parallel military-style anti-immigrant raids at home. These are not unrelated campaigns but progeny of the same failure of the international community or the US Congress to address the military adventurism reigning since 2001. Israel didn’t expand the war to civilians or foreign fronts on its own; it followed the logic of the wider war the US initiated in 2001.
Secondary Victims of the War on Gaza
The war on Gaza has also worsened other conflicts, as the US has subjected all policy to the Israel test. The Sudanese people, for example, are secondary victims of Gaza, as the US has abandoned efforts to rein in the outside actors, such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, driving Sudan’s catastrophic civil war. The UAE hired Colombian mercenaries to help the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces in the brutal massacres of tens of thousands in the city of El Fasher, yet faced no reprimand from the US. On the contrary, UAE acquiescence to Israel’s repression of Palestine had already been rewarded with trade and technology through the Abraham Accords. Now, silence on Gaza buys the UAE expedited access to American weapon sales, security guarantees, and technology trade deals. Meanwhile in Sudan, the largest humanitarian crisis in the world grinds on, with millions facing displacement, hunger, and violence—unrecognized casualties of the Gaza war.
Other victims of the Gaza war include the nearly ten million children projected to die because of cuts in developmental and health assistance programs worldwide. Cutting funding for aid has long been a Trump goal, but it was the Gaza war that provided the fiscal pretext and martial vocabulary for the massive resource shift from developmental to military spending. As of May, 2026 the US had spent $32 billion on Operation Epic Fury in Iran, and at least $21 billion in aid to Israel. Trump’s proposed 2027 budget includes an unprecedented 42 percent increase for the Pentagon, paid for by cuts in domestic programs like child protective services. Children in Gaza, the US, and across the world are all victims of this militarization.
The Technical Frontier
Gaza has become a testing ground for emerging technology like weaponized pagers, robotic soldiers, and lasers. Israel is openly marketing these controversial weapons as “battle-tested,” and booming sales illustrate their widening acceptance. And, as in other wars, technologies for the battlefield rapidly transfer to domestic policing. Just as the IDF gathered biometric scans without the consent of Palestinians, DHS agents now regularly scan detainees as well as lawful protesters. Nor will these technologies stay in the hands of approved buyers for long. Already non-state actors from Lebanon to West Africa to Mexico are adopting the technology and tactics on display in Gaza.
Most controversially, in Gaza Israel pioneered the integration of AI into targeting, allowing it to rapidly process biometric, text, and social media data to produce kill lists. This hasn’t improved protection for civilians. In October, 2023 Israel used AI to successfully locate and kill an alleged Hamas official, but more than 100 civilians were killed in the airstrike as well. The US used AI to rapidly generate hundreds of targets at the outset of the 2026 war in Iran, but one target was the girl’s school in Minab where 165 were killed.
AI doesn’t just accelerate the timeline of targeting and military operations planning, however; it fundamentally changes warfare by disadvantaging human input. This includes not only those responsible for final approval of targets, but the analysts who once guided policy. In the US those have been State Department, intelligence or academic experts on regions and ongoing negotiations, Congressional committees, and the public, which struggles to remain informed and to organize in the face of whirlwind shifts in military strategy.
Normalizing Atrocities
The Gaza war proved that exposing crimes doesn’t guarantee consequences. Initially there was hope that social media’s ability to circumvent Israeli restrictions on and targeting of journalists would galvanize global action, but three years of conflict have destroyed that dream. Images from Gaza still horrify, but the fragmentary, decontextualized coverage provokes merely momentary outrage. Satellite images of desolation, press conferences brazenly announcing violations of international law, and home-made videos of heartbreaking tragedy fight for space and attention with infomercials and comic pet videos. Yes, activists have new content to share while making their case for Palestine before the world; but it is the persistent organizing, not the availability of content, that has raised awareness of Gaza.
The Gaza War has not only proven that horror could become mundane, but that it could be repurposed. After Joe Biden targeted student protesters, not Israeli crimes, as the problem, and he and Trump seeded social platforms with scenes of supposed mayhem at home and abroad, it was easy for the White House to demonize anti-Zionist and anti-ICE protesters as domestic terrorists in the 2025 directive NPSM-7. And the Trump administration’s infamous posts featuring military raids in Venezuela and the streets of Chicago would have been unthinkable before Gaza showed that war videos can provide viral publicity with few consequences. Just one year into Trump’s term, images of US strikes in the Caribbean or on Iran are as ubiquitous as images of Israeli strikes on Gaza or Lebanon, and produce the same diminishing returns of indignation. Twenty-five years of GWOT has made it easy for Americans to relegate news of war to background noise.
We are Already In the Wider War
The war in Gaza didn’t begin on October 7, but with the decades-long failure to address the war on Palestine or rein in the disastrous GWOT. The war on Gaza is one front of this wider war we have lived with but denied for years.
We know the slow genocide continues in Palestine just as we know this wider war is destabilizing the world and threatening democracy in the US. Continuing the denial isn’t a strategy we can afford.