Donald Trump threatened this week to commit genocide against Iran even as Israel kept bombing Lebanon and killed more than 200 people in a single day. The threat landed alongside a line he wrote on Tuesday: “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” a sentence that now reads less like warning than permission.
What made the moment so stark was not just the language, but the scale of the violence already underway. The article says the US-Israeli war on Iran began with the mass killing of 175 people in the city of Minab, most of them schoolgirls, while 763 Iranian schools and 316 medical centres have reportedly been damaged or destroyed. Trump had said just over a year ago, “A civilisation has been wiped out in Gaza.”
That line matters because Gaza is not being used here as metaphor. It is the political and moral backdrop to the current escalation, and the article argues that western politicians and media outlets spent two and a half years normalising Israel’s actions in Palestine. Within days of the assault on Gaza beginning, Yoav Gallant announced “no electricity, no food, no water” for Gaza and justified the blockade by calling Palestinians “human animals”. Donald Trump later echoed that language when he said attacking critical Iranian infrastructure would be a war crime and answered, “They’re animals.”
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The pattern did not stop there. Isaac Herzog said there was “an entire nation out there that is responsible”, while an unnamed Israeli general described “the citizens of Gaza” as “human beasts” who would be “dealt with accordingly” in “hell”. The death toll since then has made the language harder, not easier, to dismiss: more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza, and at least 1,722 health workers have died there.
The friction point is that the legal system has already tried to catch up. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, but many western states have refused to honour them, and the US put the ICC judges on a sanctions list. The judges, the article says, were abandoned by their own European governments. That leaves the same governments that once spoke about restraint now tied to a war in which civilians, schools and hospitals have become targets and the language around them has been steadily emptied out.
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What happens next is no longer hard to see. If the rhetoric continues to move ahead of the law, and the law keeps being ignored, then the next phase of this war will not be judged by what leaders say they oppose. It will be judged by how much they were willing to excuse once the killing was already visible.
