Gamifying Genocide: How Israel Turned Mass Murder Into Red Light, Green Light
Israelis have named their slaughter of starving Palestinians 'Operation Salted Fish'—their version of the children's game Red Light, Green Light—while the world treats genocide as background noise.

The Israeli military has achieved something unprecedented in the annals of human cruelty: they have transformed genocide into background noise. As the world fixates on the specter of war with Iran, the daily massacres of Palestinian civilians at so-called "aid distribution sites" have become what one Israeli reservist chillingly described as routine—"a place with its own set of rules where the loss of human life means nothing."
“It’s a Killing Field”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has delivered a damning exposé that confirms what Palestinian witnesses have been screaming into the void for months: Israeli soldiers are deliberately gunning down unarmed civilians waiting for food. The headline reads like something from a fever dream of human depravity: "It's a killing field. IDF soldiers ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid."
But this is no aberration. This is policy. Israeli commanders are ordering troops to open fire on crowds of starving people as standard military procedure. Since May alone, 549 Palestinians have been slaughtered at these sites, with over 4,000 wounded. The method is as calculated as it is sadistic: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars—an arsenal of death deployed against people whose only crime is hunger.
One Israeli soldier, speaking to Haaretz with the casual tone of someone describing a morning routine, explained their system: "Between 1 and 5 people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force. No crowd control measures, no tear gas, just live fire with everything imaginable." He added with chilling matter-of-factness: "Our form of communication is gunfire."
Gamifying Genocide
The soldiers have even given their killing spree a name: "Operation Salted Fish"—the Israeli version of the children's game Red Light, Green Light. They are literally gamifying genocide, turning mass murder into entertainment while the world scrolls past their atrocities like social media background noise.
The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, the organization running these death traps, is not a humanitarian group at all. It is a mercenary operation run by evangelical extremists close to both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to provide cover for ethnic cleansing while creating killing fields for sport. The aid sites operate for precisely one hour each morning, with Israeli forces firing on anyone who arrives early or stays late. It is humanitarian theater at its most grotesque.
When confronted with their own soldiers' admissions of mass murder, Netanyahu's response was predictably Orwellian: he dismissed the reports as "blood libels." The Israeli military's own confessions of systematic war crimes are now branded as anti-Semitic lies. They have managed to weaponize victimhood so thoroughly that their soldiers' testimonies of murdering and raping children become evidence of persecution.
The Western Mind: Denial of Crimes More Believable Than Confessions
Meanwhile, Western media dutifully parrots Netanyahu's denials. Headlines read: 'Netanyahu rejects report' and 'Israeli military rejects report'—as if the words of war criminals who deny their crimes carry more weight than those of war criminals who confess to them. The propaganda is so lazy it borders on parody: Israeli lobby asset Richard Kemp was filmed praising the "safety" of these sites while gunshots could literally be heard in the background of his own video.
The death toll statistics reveal the scope of this extermination campaign. Official counts hover around 55,000, but these only include identified bodies brought to barely functioning hospitals. The real number likely exceeds 100,000 souls—probably reaching at least 400,000 when accounting for those buried under rubble, vaporized by bombs, or disappeared without trace. The Gaza Health Ministry's latest list reads like a catalog of humanity's destruction: eleven pages of names before reaching a single child over six months old. Eight babies died on the day they were born. Their entire existence on this planet occurred during genocide.
Israeli Finance Minister Demon Bezalel Smotrich recently referenced Gaza's population as 1.8 million, down from the pre-war figure of around 2.2 million. This casual revision of nearly half a million missing people may represent the most inadvertent admission of mass extermination in modern diplomatic history.
Israel’s Ultimate Achievement: Making Genocide Background Noise
Public opinion has collapsed for Israel's genocide project. Among Democrats, support has plummeted from over 50% to just 21%, with 60% now siding with Palestinians. Yet this democratic rejection means nothing in a system where Congress functions as an Israeli subsidiary and members show up wearing IDF uniforms to legislative sessions.
The bitter irony is palpable: as the world braces for potential war with Iran—a conflict that would serve Israeli strategic interests—the ongoing extermination of Gaza has been relegated to background noise. The threat of future violence drowns out the reality of present genocide. Iran looms as tomorrow's crisis while children die today in killing fields designed by Israel and funded with Western weapons.
This is the ultimate achievement of Israeli statecraft: making genocide boring. They have normalized mass murder so thoroughly that the systematic slaughter of civilians generates less media attention than political smear campaigns against Israel's critics. The mechanics of extermination have been refined into routine administrative procedure, complete with operational names borrowed from children's games.
Worse Than Nazis
We are perhaps witnessing something worse than the Nazi genocide—a killing machine that operates without shame, broadcasting its crimes as entertainment while the world treats industrialized child torture, rape and murder as just another news cycle to scroll past. Centuries of Western white supremacist colonialism have turned the world into an inhumane hellhole where human life—Arab life—is worthless if you do not fall within the 7% of global people classified as ethnic European or "white," which includes white Jews without a Semitic bone in them. The Palestinians of Gaza are dying in real time, turned into background characters in someone else's geopolitical drama, their screams muffled by the louder drumbeat of fake outcries against “antisemitism” — not against Semites, mind you, but against white blond ethnic Europeans calling themselves Jews.
History will judge not just the perpetrators, but those who chose to look away while genocide became elevator music.
- Karim
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I’ve run out of words to express my anger, and I pride myself on a large vocabulary. My r/l friends have spurned my attempts to persuade them to read columns such as this one because “we already read the NYT and WaPo and watch MSNBC, so we have no bandwidth for more”. As a result, they are clueless, and they think I spend too much time “worrying about something I can’t control”.
Thank you for writing this. It dovetails with Chris Hedges latest column on weaponized starvation. It doesn’t surprise me that the Israelis named their latest project of cruelty after a children’s game. I often think the IOF is playing video games with human targets.
The unspeakable truth is that they might get away with it. Thank you Karim for another great article.