In light of the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli war machine, which does not stop harvesting the lives of innocents and destroying the infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, new chapters of Israel’s strategy, which are not limited to military power, are not only armed, but also armed with extremely dangerous and influential media and legal weapons.
While international accusations of Israel are escalating of war crimes and flagrant violations of international law, the interface emerged to the existence of a secret unit within the General Staff of the Army known as the “legitimacy cell”.
This unit – which differs in its nature from the traditional combat units – does not shoot or launch raids, but rather formulate accounts that are based on elaborate lies, and are considered the mastermind behind misleading media campaigns that seek to justify the random bombing and the destruction of hospitals and schools.
Diaspora strategy
The “Legitimacy Cell” is not just a public relations office, but rather a intelligence agency specializing in formulating carefully directed accounts to address international public opinion. After October 7, 2023, Israel realized the urgent need for such a unit to cover the increasing atrocities and the mass destruction that caused Gaza, and to direct the international debate path away from its violations.
According to a report published by the “Credole Arab” website on August 15, 2025, the cell work is focused on “collecting intelligence information, not to serve the field military operations, but to support the Israeli account in the global media.”
The most prominent tasks of this unit are to provide legal justifications for comprehensive destruction by employing terms such as the principle of “proportion”, as Israel justifies targeting overcrowded residential areas, claiming to contain military targets, and that the tremendous destruction that inflicted infrastructure and residential buildings is just “side damage” that is considered commensurate with the “goal value”.
This distorted interpretation of the term “proportionality” completely ignores the size of unjustified human losses, which empties the principle of its human content.
The cell also repeated allegations of “the use of civilians as human shields” by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), a claim that Human Rights Watch described as “a repeated pretext to justify the targeting of civilians”, which gives legal responsibility for the lives of civilians on the victims themselves.
The matter does not stop here, as sources revealed that the cell is also seeking to discredit journalists in Gaza.
“If the media talks about the killing of innocent Israeli journalists, a journalist can be accused, as if to justify the killing of others,” an intelligence source said.
This strategy shows that the goal is not only to justify the crimes committed, but also to undermine the credibility of the eyewitnesses and silence the independent votes that seek to transfer the truth, which justifies their targeting and undermines any independent report that transmits the field reality.
According to observers, this strategy is specially designed to strangle any alternative novel about the Israeli official novel, and to give legitimacy to the targeted killing of reporters by spreading doubt about their professional integrity.
This cell also works to build novels carefully to address two different audiences: the Israeli internal public to enhance the “ethical” idea of the army, and the international public in a polished legal language that deceives public opinion and weakens the reports of independent human rights organizations, creating a double image of reality.
War of novels and refute the principle of military necessity
In the midst of the battle of accounts, the bloody scene in the Gaza Strip continues tragicly, while the “Legitimacy Cell” justifies the army operations, the reality shows the size of the human tragedy that completely contradicts all the allegations of “legitimacy”.
A United Nations report on the raid of Al -Ahly Baptist Hospital on October 17, 2023, indicated the killing of approximately 500 Palestinians in the bombing, while Israel was quick to blame the Islamic Jihad movement, based on audio recordings that the movement said was “fabricated.”
This novel caused global confusion and affected the confidence of some media outlets in the official Palestinian sources, but the uninterrupted fact is that a hospital is crowded with wounded and displaced people has turned into a bloody massacre.
The Israeli bombing was not limited to hospitals only, but also included UNRWA schools, mosques, churches and desalination plants, according to Amnesty International reports.
These flagrant violations of international laws left an unprecedented environmental and health disaster that made life in the sector almost impossible.
The comprehensive destruction of the basic infrastructure – such as hospitals, water and sanitation networks – led to the outbreak of epidemics and infectious diseases, and the collapse of the health system completely, which doubled the suffering of civilians in an indispensable manner.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights said that what is happening in Gaza “may amount to genocide,” stressing that the volume of civil targeting cannot be justified in any way of the principle of military necessity.
The horizon of international justice and accounting
The presence of a “legitimacy cell” is essentially considered an implicit recognition from Israel that it commits acts that go beyond the law and require justification and camouflage, because “an army confident of the legitimacy of its actions does not need a secret unit to produce accounts,” as international law expert Richard Falk.
Falk emphasized that this behavior is evidence of lack of confidence in the legal position of Israeli military operations, and that the presence of this secret cell is an implicit recognition that the actions of the Israeli army are not straightforward before international law, which requires the creation of justifications and pre -false defenses.
According to experts, this systematic manipulation of the law aims to transform international justice into a mere field of media maneuvers, and to weaken the ability of the international community to impose accountability, which establishes a culture of impunity and encourages more violations in the future without fear of accountability.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch decisively demanded the United Nations and the International Criminal Court to open independent and transparent investigations, stressing that “the official Israeli account cannot be the only reference for the investigation.”
In a world in which the facts are mixed with lies and distorting the narratives, the truth becomes the most precious thing and the victims need, as the Israeli “legitimacy cell” reveals that the Gaza war was not only military, but a comprehensive war on consciousness and human conscience.
(Tagstotranslate) Politics (T) Middle East (T) Arabic (T) Palestine