Scrolling Through War

Can we believe our eyes?

This past week, reports came out of Gaza City that over a hundred Gazans died in a rush on an aid convoy guarded by IDF tanks. The convoy trucks were carrying sacks of flour, an increasingly precious commodity in the densely populated strip. While the IDF admitted that its soldiers used live fire against a perceived mob threat, they’ve insisted that most of the casualties were caused by crowd stampede or the panicked Gazan truck drivers. They also question the casualty numbers provided by the Gazan “health ministry,” which is under the direct control of Hamas. Despite this, international calls for an independent probe are mounting, with leaders from David Cameron to Emmanuel Macron issuing outraged condemnations. Meanwhile, Hamas has used the incident to freeze current hostage release talks. Of course, Hamas has yet to meet a hostage deal it likes this year, but any excuse will do.

Gaza City is in northern Gaza, where Israel has systematically dismantled Hamas. But the area remains chaotic, roiling with human misery and mistrust. Every day brings new installments in a never-ending debate over how best to supply the strip with humanitarian aid, how to ensure that the aid reaches the people who actually need it, and where to place the blame when it doesn’t. With patchy cooperation from its Arab neighbors and from the agencies tasked with distributing the aid, Israel has, as usual, been put in an impossibly difficult position.

In 2024, this difficulty is compounded by the fact that the public can now watch war in real time on Twitter—or, rather, we can watch the bloody, broken little fragments of war that Twitter has curated for us, depending on which corner of Twitter we’re scrolling through. I think about this constantly, as a digital native resigned to half living on Twitter in order to do what I do. I have my priors, of course. I have my biases. I know who I am inclined to trust and who I’m inclined to mistrust, with very good reason. Still, sometimes I wonder, “What am I really seeing? And what am I supposed to do with it?”