Every so often, we come across stories, or the beginnings of stories, on social media. We start investigating their accounts, trying to establish what actually happened. On several occasions, I have found myself wondering whether the Israeli army contacts specific individuals in Gaza and gives them a choice: it can either kill them alone or kill them alongside their entire families. It then orders them to go somewhere, often the rooftop of a distant building or a particular street, where they are subsequently targeted and killed.
Each time I have followed up on a story like this, I have found contradictions in the accounts. Sometimes the family says the person was targeted indiscriminately. Other times, it is impossible to obtain any information at all.
The narrative that emerges, often sourced from Israeli websites, seems designed to promote the idea that the Israeli army possesses a degree of mercy and compassion: that it chooses to kill someone away from their family rather than kill the entire family with them. As though the mass killing of a family has become one option, and the individual killing of a person another.
The image itself, supposedly intended to demonstrate the humanity of this criminal, instead reveals the most brutal form of cruelty. It describes a person being ordered to walk towards his own certain death, counting his steps one by one, in the hope of saving his family from being killed alongside him. He becomes a victim who walks willingly towards his execution, a sacrificial offering who chooses the place and accepts death so that others might live.
Yet despite the symbolism of these stories and the pain they carry, they are, more often than not, difficult to verify or entirely unfounded.
The latest example involved Muhammad al-Bayouk, whom Israeli newspapers reported had received a call from the Israeli army instructing him to climb onto the roof of a neighboring building, where he would then be targeted. As the reports circulated and his name spread across social media, his family issued a public clarification statement on behalf of prominent members of the al-Bayouk family.
The statement categorically denied the claims circulating on social media and attributed to the Israeli occupation, according to which the army had contacted their son, the martyr Muhammad Aleyan al-Bayouk, before targeting him or issuing him any prior warning.
The family stressed that “these allegations were entirely false,” explaining that he had been directly targeted with artillery shells, without any phone call, warning, or prior notification. It also insisted that “the blood of their son was not a subject for rumors or the falsification of facts,” and rejected what it described as the “occupation’s attempts to mislead public opinion and evade responsibility for its crime.”
Similar accounts have circulated in recent weeks. One involved a young man who was reportedly at a shopping mall in Gaza City with his sister when the Israeli army allegedly called him and ordered him to leave the building, threatening to bomb the entire mall if he did not. The account was never independently verified. Recently, when a similar story about al-Bayouk circulated on social media, we wanted to share it.
When I first heard the account, I contacted several colleagues on the ground. There was so much pain embedded in the story, so much that could be conveyed to readers if it were true that someone had actually been ordered to walk towards his own death. Surely, at the very least, his family would have heard the phone call. If he knew he was going to die, there would have been some gesture of farewell, some final words or indication that he was leaving them for the last time.
But after speaking with several colleagues, it became clear that these accounts had no factual basis so far.
During our discussions, some colleagues suggested that these were narratives manufactured by the Israeli occupation to single out particular individuals, psychologically torment them, and make them experience death before they were eventually killed.
Another colleague offered a different possibility: perhaps the army really does intend to reduce the number of people killed in some of its attacks. But, he added, it had shown no such consideration for the number of people it killed when it burned children, women, older adults, and entire families in mass killings, a pattern that continues as the genocide enters its third year.
The truth is that none of these possibilities diminishes or conceals the brutality of what is happening. Whether people are killed suddenly in the presence of their families or targeted individually, the reality remains the same. Nor does it change the nature of the daily bombardment and killing that continues across Gaza, attacks that no longer receive regular coverage on news platforms, as though they have become an ordinary part of life. The difference lies in the manner of killing, not in whether the killing takes place.
People are killed and bombed in Gaza every single day.
And if the Israeli army wants to suggest that it continues to kill people but now warns its intended victims, making them walk towards their own gallows as though this somehow constitutes a humanitarian gesture, then what a terrible form of cruelty this is in the world that Gaza’s residents are forced to inhabit.
