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This story originally appeared in Jacobin<\/a> on April 01, 2026. It is shared here with permission.<\/p>\n One of the most appalling aspects of the Gaza genocide \u2014 besides its\u00a0near-unprecedented<\/a>\u00a0slaughter of children and other innocents and its near-obliteration from existence of an entire society, unpparalleled in the modern era \u2014 is that officials in both the United States and Israel were overtly hoping to make it the new, horrifying standard for modern war. As we\u2019re seeing right now in Iran and Lebanon, they\u2019re not wasting any time applying that standard elsewhere.<\/p>\n Last year, as Gaza lay in ruins with more than\u00a010 percent<\/a>\u00a0of its population killed or injured, the\u00a0New Yorker<\/a>\u00a0ran a chilling story related to the Gaza genocide. The magazine reported that a variety of US military lawyers and legal experts viewed Israel\u2019s spree of murder and destruction in Gaza as not just a completely acceptable way to prosecute a war but as \u201ca dress rehearsal\u201d for a future conflict with a US adversary like China: namely, one free of restraint, adherence to international law, and squeamishness about killing civilians.<\/p>\n What Israel did with full US backing in Gaza, in other words, should be the new normal for war, at least when \u201cour side\u201d does it.<\/p>\n The report sat uncomfortably alongside a pattern of\u00a0US<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Israeli officials<\/a>\u00a0incessantly\u00a0invoking<\/a>\u00a0the Allies\u2019 carpet bombing campaigns during World War II to justify the genocide they carried out. For almost the entire period after the war, those bombing campaigns were universally understood to be war crimes and a moral horror \u2014 including by\u00a0Curtis LeMay<\/a>\u00a0himself, the psychotic general who led the firebombing of Japan and later itched for nuclear war with the Soviet Union \u2014 and one that the civilized world immediately outlawed after that war, when it created the system of international law that today clings on by its fingernails.<\/p>\n It was so appalling that even Richard Nixon felt the need to\u00a0pretend<\/a>\u00a0to the press in 1972 that the Dresden firebombing had gone too far and that he would never do such a thing to Vietnam, even though he would be totally justified if he did. (He did do it, for the record). Yet for the past three years, American and Israeli hawks have no longer even bothered to pretend.<\/p>\n What is now playing out in Iran and Lebanon is this doctrine in action.<\/p>\n Iran as Gaza<\/p>\n While estimates vary, there is a rough consensus that the United States and Israel dropped somewhere around a thousand munitions a day on Iran in the early days of the war, a similar rate to the\u00a0first few<\/a>\u00a0days of Israel\u2019s unprecedented bombing of Gaza. In fact, if Israel\u2019s\u00a0own estimate<\/a>\u00a0of having dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran over the first twenty-six days is accurate, then the daily average of 577 bombs Israel dropped on Iran outstripped the first month of its bombing of Gaza in 2023, where it reportedly\u00a0dropped<\/a>\u00a0just under five hundred bombs a day.<\/p>\n According to Airwars, the independent watchdog group that tracks civilian bombings, if we use the slightly different measure of the\u00a0number of targets struck, the first hundred hours of the US-Israeli war on Iran was twice as ferocious as the same period in Gaza three years ago. Israel hit\u00a0around half<\/a>\u00a0as many targets in Gaza as it and the US military struck in Iran in the first four days of this current war (four thousand).<\/p>\n Bear in mind that Gaza, particularly its earliest days and weeks, had been the most intense bombing campaign of this century,\u00a0outstripping<\/a>\u00a0Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the war against ISIS, and Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine \u2014 and even many wars of the last century.<\/p>\n The US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.<\/p>\n As a result, the US-Israeli method of war in Iran shares a number of characteristics that, at the time, were considered unprecedented and unique to the Gaza war.<\/p>\n The war began with a massacre of children, in what has now been\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0to have been a targeted US bombing of a school that killed more than a hundred young girls. We now know it also began with the\u00a0bombing<\/a>\u00a0of a sports hall and a different elementary school that killed twenty-one people, including two children, using a new short-range missile whose first-ever use in combat was this war. The US and Israeli militaries have since then\u00a0dropped<\/a>\u00a0heavy bombs on entire\u00a0residential buildings<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0destroyed<\/a>\u00a0whole\u00a0residential blocks<\/a>\u00a0despite the obvious danger to civilians,\u00a0burying<\/a>\u00a0ordinary Iranians under the rubble.<\/p>\n According to the\u00a0Iranian Red Crescent Society<\/a>, basically the local Iranian equivalent of the Red Cross, Israel has damaged or destroyed a total of more than 90,000 residential units around Iran, more than three hundred health and medical facilities, more than seven hundred universities and\u00a0schools<\/a>, and a range of other civilian structures. That\u00a0includes<\/a>\u00a0pharmacies,\u00a0scores<\/a>\u00a0of police stations and other security sites, and the\u00a0infrastructure<\/a>\u00a0used to pay officers, as well as a\u00a0desalination plant<\/a>\u00a0that helps provide drinking water and centuries-old\u00a0heritage sites<\/a>. It has also\u00a0targeted<\/a>\u00a0Iranian nuclear facilities with bombings at least\u00a0three times<\/a>\u00a0since the start of the war,\u00a0risking<\/a>\u00a0a terrible accident. Both Israel and Donald Trump have since threatened to destroy Iran\u2019s other energy infrastructure.<\/p>\n Israel has\u00a0bombed<\/a>\u00a0oil facilities in Tehran in what amounted to a chemical attack, causing clouds of toxic fumes to linger over the city and choke its air for days and black acid rain to pour onto those below. It has now also\u00a0targeted<\/a>\u00a0infrastructure crucial to Iran\u2019s food supply and a\u00a0cancer drug<\/a>\u00a0facility, as well as its\u00a0steel production<\/a>, critical to both the country\u2019s economy and its ability to rebuild after the war.<\/p>\n There is strong evidence that at least part of the reason for the indiscriminate and lawless carnage is the reliance on\u00a0artificial intelligence<\/a>\u00a0for targeting, while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the US military, running low on precision munitions, would\u00a0start using<\/a>\u00a0massive five-hundred-, one-thousand-, and two-thousand-pound bombs that do more indiscriminate damage.<\/p>\n This should all sound familiar. Bombing with no regard for danger to civilians, the use of AI and massive bombs in densely populated places, the seemingly casual slaughter of children, the use of chemical warfare and hunger as weapons of war, attacks on civilian infrastructure crucial to the basic functioning of society, including energy production, health care facilities, and heritage sites \u2014 these were all the hallmarks of Israel\u2019s war on Gaza.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the methods of the Gaza war that are being replicated \u2014 on the US side, it\u2019s also the rhetoric. Hegseth has dispensed with the kind of lip service that US officials used to pay to ethical warfare and concern about civilians and is instead increasingly uttering dark, Israeli-style warnings about collective murder of all Iranians,\u00a0threatening<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cdeath and destruction from the sky all day long\u201d would be visited on the country and\u00a0warning<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe only ones that need to be worried right now are Iranians that think they\u2019re gonna live.\u201d Just a week ago, he literally\u00a0prayed<\/a>\u00a0for God to \u201cbreak the teeth of the ungodly\u201d and bring \u201coverwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy\u201d in this war.<\/p>\n Lebanon as Gaza<\/p>\n It would be bad enough if this was limited to Iran. But we\u2019re seeing the same thing in the war Israel is concurrently waging in Lebanon.<\/p>\n There the Israeli military has\u00a0illegally<\/a>\u00a0been\u00a0giving<\/a>\u00a0Lebanese civilians forced\u00a0evacuation orders<\/a>\u00a0in the face of likely death in indiscriminate bombing, leading to the displacement of more than one million people, or an unfathomable\u00a020 percent<\/a>\u00a0of Lebanon\u2019s population. It\u00a0plans<\/a>\u00a0to indefinitely occupy a large swath of Lebanon\u2019s territory as a \u201cbuffer zone,\u201d for which it is leveling all the now-emptied homes and buildings left by their former residents \u2014 though not before Israeli soldiers\u00a0gleefully loot<\/a>\u00a0the homes first.<\/p>\n In the process, Israel has been\u00a0seemingly<\/a>\u00a0deliberately<\/a>\u00a0targeting Lebanese health care workers and\u00a0journalists<\/a>, killing dozens the former and five of the latter so far, including nine paramedics it\u00a0killed<\/a>\u00a0across Southern Lebanon this past weekend in a series of strikes on health care sites. There is also evidence it has used\u00a0white phosphorus<\/a>\u00a0over residential areas.<\/p>\n What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare.<\/p>\n All of these were previously beyond-the-pale crimes that became appallingly regular features of Israel\u2019s razing of Gaza. And they come alongside other Gaza parallels we just went through with Iran that have been repeated in Lebanon, including\u00a0attacks<\/a>\u00a0on\u00a0health care<\/a>\u00a0facilities, residential buildings, and other civilian infrastructure like\u00a0power plants<\/a>,\u00a0water and sanitation<\/a>\u00a0sites, and the\u00a0agricultural land<\/a>\u00a0it relies on to produce food.<\/p>\n Israeli officials have actually been explicit about this,\u00a0pointing to<\/a>\u00a0their actions in Gaza to\u00a0explain<\/a>\u00a0their war plans in Lebanon and even\u00a0invoking<\/a>\u00a0Israel\u2019s genocidal destruction of the territory as a\u00a0threat<\/a>. Maybe most chilling, one of the most vile statistics of the Israeli forces\u2019 conduct in Gaza \u2014 that they had killed a classroom\u2019s worth of children every day,\u00a0according to<\/a>\u00a0the head of the United Nations Children\u2019s Fund (UNICEF) \u2014 is almost the\u00a0exact same statistic\u00a0the deputy chief of UNICEF\u00a0just used<\/a>\u00a0to describe what Israel is doing in Lebanon right now.<\/p>\n We Are All Gaza Now<\/p>\n What we are witnessing right now in the Middle East is the Gazafication of warfare. It is clear that Israel and Washington are determined to make some of the most repellant Israeli behavior in Gaza, the actions we thought of as unique, world-historical exhibits of human sadism, the new normal for all of their wars going forward.<\/p>\n This is abominable on a basic human level. The point of international law is that everyone tacitly agrees on certain ground rules, as a way of ensuring certain behavior in warfare is off limits no matter who is involved. But once you start making exceptions for yourself, your adversaries can do it too, and the result is far from pretty \u2014 as we are seeing with Iran\u2019s own retaliatory strikes on civilian infrastructure and the sudden\u00a0cries<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0neocons<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Israeli<\/a>\u00a0officials<\/a>\u00a0that by imitating them, Iran is carrying out war crimes.<\/p>\n Adherence to international law is not a light switch you can turn on and off at your convenience. By doing their best to shred the concept, Israel and Trump officials are not just engaging in heinous crimes. They\u2019re creating a more brutish world where their own people are at higher risk of the very wrong they\u2019re busy committing now: a world in which future US adversaries, for instance, will have less compunction about attacking Americans\u2019 food supply or the infrastructure that keeps them warm in winter, or destroying or disabling the health care facilities they rely on when they\u2019re sick, all because of an unpopular war started by leaders that most Americans don\u2019t even like.<\/p>\n The Gazafication of war by Trump and Israel is a big gamble. And it is our lives, and the lives of our children, our families, and other loved ones, that they are putting up as collateral.<\/p>\n This <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/therealnews.com\/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal”>article<\/a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/therealnews.com”>The Real News Network<\/a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nd\/4.0\/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.<img src=”https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therealnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/cropped-TRNN-2021-logomark-square.png?resize=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”><\/p>\n <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https:\/\/therealnews.com\/?republication-pixel=true&post=342446&ga4=G-7LYS8R7V51″ style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https:\/\/therealnews.com\/us-israel-gaza-style-war-new-normal”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } <\/script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”\/\/cdn.parsely.com\/keys\/therealnews.com\/p.js”><\/script>