While some hail Israel’s strikes on Iran as tactical victories, they ignore the devastation Israel has wrought upon Gaza, where women, children, and entire neighborhoods have been wiped out with impunity.
WEB REPORT
ISLAMABAD: June 20, 2025
On June 12, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes targeting Iran’s military infrastructure, reportedly killing top commanders and severely damaging critical sites. For some Western analysts, this was a masterstroke, a long-awaited blow against Tehran’s regional ambitions. But the celebration of military precision obscures a far more disturbing truth: that Israel’s strategic calculations are increasingly accompanied by systemic brutality and a callous disregard for civilian life, most notably in Gaza.
For decades, the Israeli government has justified its aggression by citing Iran’s support for proxy groups. But if we are to judge nations by the consequences of their actions, then Israel’s conduct in occupied Palestine must take center stage. No missile strike in Tehran can be viewed in isolation from the unrelenting siege of Gaza, where more than 55,000 Palestinians, over two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed since October 2023, according to UN agencies and international watchdogs.
Entire hospitals have been flattened. Refugee camps turned into graveyards. Journalists and medics have been deliberately targeted, in what many legal experts are now calling war crimes.
To cite Israel’s “right to defend itself” while deliberately erasing its colonial occupation, decades of apartheid policies, and disproportionate use of force is to rewrite reality in the service of power.
A Strategy Built on Double Standards:
The western media in question portrays Iran’s missile retaliation as reckless, while casting Israel’s expansion of the war as forced and defensive. But this framing ignores critical context.
Yes, Iran has empowered proxy groups. But Israel, too, has long operated beyond its borders—with drone strikes in Syria, assassinations in Iran, and military operations in Lebanon. When Iran finally responded with missile salvos after years of Israeli provocations, the world condemned it. But when Israel, backed by the world’s most powerful military alliances, flattened entire neighborhoods in Gaza and bombed airports in Syria and Lebanon, many called it “deterrence.”
This selective morality weakens the legitimacy of international law itself. A rules-based global order cannot endure when one state is allowed to act with impunity, while its adversaries are painted as “terror sponsors” for resisting occupation or intervention.
What About Gaza?
Israel’s apologists rarely mention Gaza, not because it’s irrelevant, but because it is inconvenient. The narrative of Israeli precision collapses when faced with the statistics: thousands of children buried under rubble, schools and UN shelters bombed, aid convoys blocked, and a population pushed to the brink of starvation.
How can anyone justify regional strikes on the grounds of “deterrence” while ignoring the ongoing blockade and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza? If Iran’s support for Hamas is criminal, then what label do we assign to Israel’s decades-long blockade and illegal settlement expansion?
Resistance is Not Terrorism:
What the Western media frames as “maximum aggression” by Iran and its allies ignores a fundamental truth: resistance does not emerge in a vacuum. The violence of the oppressed cannot be equated with the violence of the occupier. Palestinians have lived under military siege, denied dignity and basic rights, while the world turns its eyes to “Iranian escalation.”
To say Israel “had no choice” is to imply that mass civilian deaths are acceptable collateral damage, an argument no democracy should ever accept.
A Reckoning is Coming:
If the world continues to tolerate one-sided militarism disguised as self-defense, it will create an international order where power, rather than justice, decides who lives and who dies. This order is already beginning to break down. While the strikes on Iran may have succeeded in hitting military targets, in Gaza, what has been devastated is the spirit of the people and the conscience of the world. (st)
