Red Wedding Warfare: How Israel Turned War Into A Spectacle To Conceal The Gaza Genocide

Phakamile Hlubi-Majola

In June 2025, the Israeli military executed a strike so surgically devastating it borrowed its name from the popular television series, Game of Thrones. It was named the “Red Wedding” operation, a name inspired by one of the most brutal betrayals in TV history. 

Just a brief recap, the Red Wedding was a massacre that occurred in Game of Thrones during the wedding of Edmure Tully and Roslin Frey. Lord Walder Frey orchestrated the event as revenge against Robb Stark for breaking a marriage pact that had been forged between the House of Stark and the House of Frey. The guests had their guard down as a result of the wedding celebration, and they were unable to respond decisively to defend themselves against a bloody ambush. 

This was the impact that Israel hoped to have on Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed he was compelled to attack because Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear weapon. But this excuse is wearing thin. For nearly 30 years, Israel has claimed Iran was “months away” from a bomb, but there is still no bomb. Meanwhile, Israel holds a nuclear arsenal of its own, which is undeclared, unchecked, and untouched. Both the U.S. intelligence community and the International Atomic Energy Agency have confirmed that Iran is not building nuclear weapons.

What we witnessed was not a genuine call for disarmament, but rather, it was about domination. We have seen this play out before in 2002 when Netanyahu misled the U.S. and the U.K. that Iraq was manufacturing  ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to push Western allies into attacking Iraq. This is the same script, just a different cast. 

The Red Wedding was an ambush against key leaders of Iran’s military. Over 200 Israeli fighter jets took off quietly, targeting 100 sites inside Iran. The strike eliminated some of Iran’s most senior defence officials. Among the dead were General Hossein Salami, the head of the Revolutionary Guard; Iranian military chief Mohammad Bagheri; and Gholam Ali Rashid from the emergency command. The outcome was devastating. Iran lost several key military leaders within hours. At the same time, they launched Operation Narnia, a parallel mission that killed nine of Iran’s leading nuclear scientists. 

It was a fast, unexpected, and ruthless attack. Within hours, Iran’s nuclear and military elite were shattered, and hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians had been killed. It was swift, cold and calculating. And it was branded like prime-time television.

It is deeply disturbing when a state-sponsored military assault is packaged with a pop culture metaphor, soaked in betrayal and carnage. This demonstrates that for Israel, war is not only a strategy, but also a spectacle. And in the shadow of this ‘performance’ is the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, whose destruction continues largely untelevised.

The ‘Red Wedding strike’ and ‘Operation Narnia’ were not just military operations designed to neutralise threats. The goal was to dominate the narrative by playing on Hollywood-style theatrics. Israel was sending an ominous message: We can strike with impunity, and we will find you in any corner of the world. But more importantly, it was designed to distract from the ongoing state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

To emphasise this, U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly views the war between Iran and Israel as ‘the perfect war’.  This is a reflection that, in his mind, it is the kind of war that captured imaginations, because it presented strength. Note that Trump is not at all concerned with peace or diplomacy, only the entertainment value of destruction. 

But this is not entertainment. Real people died. Over 1,100 Iranians were killed and thousands more wounded. And this is not an isolated event; it is part of a long and dangerous pattern of framing militarised violence as bold leadership, and the erasure of its human cost, by disguising it beneath the language of precision and power.

Meanwhile, Gaza continues to bleed, largely off-camera. Since its campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Israel has killed over fifty-six thousand people and uprooted nearly the entire population of 2.3 million people, according to Al Jazeera.

More than 16,750 children have been murdered, and over 1,000 have lost limbs, many amputated without anaesthesia due to Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza’s medical infrastructure. Hospitals have been bombed, and doctors and nurses are targeted by the military and attacked. Aid convoys and food have been blocked from entering. Those who have miraculously survived are slowly starving to death.

The UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner issued a report that even if Palestinians can reach food distribution points, the “Israeli military has shelled and shot Palestinians trying to reach the distribution points, leading to many fatalities”. This is not a tragedy. It is deliberate, systemic, state-sponsored ethnic cleansing. There is an attempt to distract the world’s attention by focusing on the ‘Red Wedding’, a spectacle designed to dominate headlines while war crimes against Palestinians are reduced to background noise.

This kind of selective outrage reveals the machinery beneath global diplomacy. Israeli military aggression toward Iran is applauded, but its sustained violence against Palestinians is ignored and even justified. What we are witnessing is not just hypocrisy; it is complicity.

The global silence on Gaza is not accidental. It is rooted in decades of settler colonial ideology, dehumanisation, and the strategic rebranding of oppression as self-defence. From Washington to Brussels, the narrative is tightly controlled, and platforms like TikTok have joined the censorship regime. Creators documenting the Palestinian crisis face shadow bans or content removal for using words like genocide. To stay visible, activists now spell it as “g3nocide” or “g*nocide”, a digital code for what many in power refuse to name aloud.

It was Chinese philosopher Confucius who said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name”. And so those of us who know the truth, and who survived Apartheid in South Africa, must act with courage and call it what it is. It is genocide, erasure and Apartheid. There is no other vocabulary that captures the scale and intent of what is unfolding against Palestinians.

Israel’s ‘Red Wedding’ strike is not just a military event; it is a cultural moment. It reveals the terrifying merger of warfare and storytelling, and the intersection of airstrikes and algorithms. It is real bloodshed framed as the narrative dominance. And it highlights the growing distance between spectacle and substance. As long as the bombs drop off-screen, some will still call it ‘peacekeeping’.

What is worse is that leaders like Trump praise these operations because of their theatrical flair. The strike’s appeal wasn’t just strategic. It was aesthetic. And when war becomes palatable because it resembles fiction, we’ve entered a new form of moral decay, one in which death is normalised if it’s well-lit and well-timed.

So what is to be done? The very least we can do is to tell the truth of what is happening, and to do so loudly and repeatedly across all platforms, across borders, and despite censorship. Because naming a genocide is not just about documentation, it is about resistance. And while Israel scripts its dominance in missiles and metaphors, millions are still demanding a different ending. One where justice, not spectacle, takes centre stage. From Gaza to Johannesburg, the call is the same. End the violence. End the genocide. Liberation is not negotiable.

* Phakamile Hlubi-Majola is a former journalist and the NUMSA National Spokesperson.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.