Evil vs. Evil, Civilians in the Crosshairs

As war expands across the Middle East, the official language remains familiar. Leaders describe their side as defensive, necessary, and morally justified. Their enemies are cast as barbaric, irrational, or genocidal. But from Gaza to Iran to Lebanon, civilians keep dying under bombs, in collapsed buildings, and amid shattered infrastructure. For many watching the region now, the conflict no longer looks like a contest between good and evil. It looks like evil vs. evil, with civilians trapped in the crosshairs.

The deeper problem is not only hatred, revenge, or deception. It is a system in which overwhelming force is treated as moral authority, where some states claim the right to strike first, explain later, and then control the story that follows. Dehumanization is part of that system, but not the whole of it. The larger engine is domination backed by impunity: the belief that some governments can decide who may live, who may die, who may be displaced, and whose suffering does not count.

That mindset has been on display repeatedly in this war.

On Feb. 28, 2026, the first day of coordinated U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran, the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab was destroyed during the school day. The Washington Post reported that at least 175 civilians were killed, many of them children.¹ Bellingcat later published an investigation concluding that newly surfaced video showed a U.S. Tomahawk missile striking an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility next to the school, showing for the first time that the United States struck the area that morning. The footage also showed smoke already rising from the vicinity of the girls’ school.² The Washington Post likewise reported that experts identified the missile in the verified video as a Tomahawk, a weapon used by the United States, and that satellite imagery showed both the nearby IRGC base and the school were damaged.¹

That matters because Tomahawks are precision-guided U.S. weapons. This was not evidence of random battlefield confusion. It was evidence that U.S. forces hit the area. Public reporting still leaves some technical questions unresolved, but the basic moral picture is ugly enough already: a school full of girls was obliterated on the opening day of an aggressive war, and the evidence quickly pointed toward the side claiming precision and restraint. The Washington Post separately reported that the school may have been on a U.S. target list and may have been mistaken for a military site, possibly based on outdated intelligence.³

President Donald Trump did not merely deny responsibility. He blamed Iran. That accusation became far harder to sustain as evidence emerged that the weapon seen in the footage was a Tomahawk, which multiple experts told The Washington Post appeared to be U.S.-made and U.S.-used.¹ If that sequence holds, then the response went beyond denial. It became inversion: the country struck was blamed for the strike. Even in war, that kind of moral reversal stands out. It is one thing to evade responsibility, another to shift it onto the wounded.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth later announced a full investigation. The Washington Post reported that Hegseth said “the truth matters” and that an outside general officer would lead the probe.⁴ That does not erase the contradiction. It sharpens it. The administration first projected confidence in blaming Iran, then shifted to a formal investigation as evidence kept pointing back toward Washington.

This war also did not appear out of nowhere. Reuters reported in 2025 that Benjamin Netanyahu had spent years treating Iran as an existential threat and pressing publicly for confrontation, with the later direct war looking less like a sudden break than the culmination of a long campaign of warnings, covert conflict, and pressure.⁵ In that sense, the current war looks less like an unforeseeable emergency than the realization of a long-nurtured agenda.

A similar pattern shadows the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. For many Palestinians and outside observers, the problem is not simply that peace failed. It is that the process often appeared to operate in bad faith: negotiations and agreements on paper, while settlement expansion and territorial consolidation kept moving forward on the ground. Reuters reported in February that Arab states condemned new Israeli measures in the occupied West Bank as steps toward annexation, while Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the government would “continue to kill the idea of a Palestinian state.”⁶ To many Palestinians, the agreements looked less like a road to peace than a way to buy time, reduce pressure, and preserve diplomatic cover while the land meant for a future Palestinian state kept shrinking.

Trump has also relied on atrocity rhetoric to justify broader escalation. In public remarks, he invoked the Oct. 7 attacks and repeated the inflammatory “chopping babies’ heads off” line. The Oct. 7 assault was a real mass atrocity. Civilians were murdered and hostages were taken. But the legal and factual questions surrounding specific atrocity claims remain separate from later attempts to use them as a standing moral license for state violence. This is part of what critics mean when they say atrocity narratives can become propaganda tools. The suffering of one set of victims is used to immunize the suffering of another from scrutiny.

The same pattern is visible in Gaza, where the destruction has produced genocide allegations now before the International Court of Justice. The Genocide Convention requires proof of intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.⁷ That legal threshold is real. But the U.S. intervention in the South Africa case did not merely say that evidence should be weighed carefully. The Associated Press reported that Washington argued widespread civilian casualties in urban warfare do not automatically demonstrate genocidal intent and warned the court against lowering the legal threshold for genocide.⁸ Critics see that not as neutral legal caution, but as an effort to narrow the frame before the evidence is fully tested.

That is why so many people hear the U.S. position as more than legal argument. In plain terms, it can sound like this: even if a people are devastated, starved, displaced, and buried under rubble, it still may not count unless intent is shown in the narrowest possible way. That may be defensible as doctrine. It is far less convincing as moral leadership. The point of a court case is to examine the evidence. When a powerful state moves early to shape the standard in the most restrictive direction while also opposing accountability elsewhere, it looks less like restraint and more like protection.

For that reason, the most careful phrasing is often that Gaza has the hallmarks or earmarks of genocide, rather than flatly declaring a final legal conclusion before the court rules. But caution in language should not become blindness in judgment. When destruction becomes systematic, when the civilian toll becomes massive, when relief, shelter, food, and safety collapse at scale, and when officials keep insisting that all of it is regrettable but necessary, ordinary people do not need a judicial opinion to recognize the shape of what they are seeing.

That sense of impunity is reinforced by what happens after the headlines fade. Even when abuse becomes public, meaningful accountability often does not follow. Reuters reported on March 12 that Israel dropped charges against five soldiers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman, despite the scandal surrounding leaked footage of the incident.⁹ The hypocrisy is not that abuse against Jews is taken seriously. It should be. The hypocrisy is that abuse against Palestinians so often is not. When Jews are threatened or attacked, the language is immediate, moral, and absolute. When Palestinians are abused, detained, tortured, displaced, or killed, the language too often becomes procedural, evasive, and full of excuses. One kind of victim receives instant moral recognition. The other is too often processed through denial, delay, and impunity.

Now the same logic is bleeding into Lebanon. Reuters reported on March 13 that Israel destroyed a key bridge over the Litani River, dropped leaflets threatening “Gaza-scale destruction,” and warned of more attacks on Lebanese infrastructure unless Hezbollah was disarmed. Reuters also reported that about 800,000 people had been displaced as the humanitarian crisis deepened.¹⁰ A threat of “Gaza-style destruction” is not, by itself, proof of genocide. But it is evidence of openly coercive rhetoric and a willingness to devastate civilian infrastructure on a massive scale, then frame that devastation as policy rather than horror.

This is where the article’s deeper point comes into focus. The real enemy is not only one army, one militia, one politician, or one state. It is the doctrine that might makes right. It is the belief that military superiority confers moral credibility, that allies may flatten civilian life and still be called civilized, and that international law is binding for the weak but negotiable for the strong. Dehumanization is the tool that makes this possible. Empire and impunity are what keep rewarding it.

That does not erase the responsibility of specific actors. People still make decisions, sign orders, launch missiles, and lie about the results. But beneath those decisions is a larger machinery of domination: force presented as order, aggression reframed as self-defense, and civilian suffering treated as unfortunate but politically manageable. Once that machinery is in motion, schools become strike zones, bridges become messages, and the dead become arguments.

The old line says the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In modern war, it is just as often paved with righteous speeches. Every side claims necessity. Every side claims defense. Every side claims the other side forced its hand. Meanwhile, children are pulled from rubble, entire populations are displaced, and the strongest powers insist that what matters most is not the bodies but the narrative.

That is why “evil vs. evil” resonates for so many people looking at this conflict. It is not a claim that every actor is identical. They are not. It is a claim that moral legitimacy cannot survive endless civilian bloodshed simply because one side says it had reasons. A state that wages aggressive war, destroys civilian life on a massive scale, then blames the victims or threatens to do the same somewhere else is not preserving civilization. It is helping bury it.

When governments abandon morality, civilians may have to become its custodians. Not executioners, but custodians. That means telling the truth when leaders lie, refusing propaganda when it demands obedience, defending the humanity of victims no matter which flag flies overhead, and withholding moral consent from crimes dressed up as necessity. States may command armies, borders, and narratives. They do not get a monopoly on conscience. When power no longer recognizes limits, ordinary people may be the last place those limits survive.

It is time to take out the trash: the lies, the propaganda, the impunity, and the machinery of power that keeps feeding civilians into the fire. Not with more dehumanization, and not with another excuse for bloodshed, but with clarity, courage, resistance, and refusal.

And civilians, as usual, are the ones left in the crosshairs.