IT was the face that launched a thousand accusations of antisemitism, each as hysterical as the face in question was hideous. It started with a cover story on the Italian magazine L’Espresso, featuring an Israeli soldier-settler-terrorist filming a distraught Palestinian woman whom he and his fellow settler-soldier-terrorist friends had come to harass. It was a scene that occurs almost daily in occupied Palestine with the approval and support of the government and armed forces of Israel, and the story in L’Espresso — titled ‘Abuse’ — is nothing new for those who follow these daily acts of harassment and occupation.
What really triggered the Zionists, though, wasn’t the content of the story but the face of the said soldier which is so fascinatingly ugly that you simply cannot tear your eyes away from it even as your senses revolt and your stomach churns. His thin lips are pulled back in a simian grin exposing pallid, retracting gums and yellowed teeth with the hint of fangs. His eyes are demonic, crowned by a single long eyebrow that resembles nothing as much as it does a giant furry caterpillar, the kind you would have a heart attack to find on your pillow. His sideburns, long and matted formed two sickly dreadlocks — like a hellish bootleg version of Bob Marley. The one positive thing you could say about his hair — facial and otherwise — is that it takes the attention away from his Neanderthal cranial ridge.
In fact, he was so absolutely, even comically repulsive, that Israelis screamed that the photo was manipulated in order to degrade Israelis and was thus, you guessed it, antisemitism. It was neither. And to prove this, L’Espresso released many more photos of the said soldier/ settler/ terrorist and also released the video of the entire interaction.
Why did this photo bother Israel so much, when it has shrugged off accusations of genocide and has even justified the mass murder of children? After all, this is the one country I know where soldiers caught on video raping a Palestinian detainee were celebrated on national TV and where members of parliament actually argued that raping Palestinian prisoners was justified. One possible answer lies in a particular aspect of Israeli propaganda: the thirst trap. For those of you who think this refers to some form of hydration, an explanation is in order: as per the Cambridge dictionary a thirst trap is “a statement by or photograph of someone on social media that is intended to attract attention or make people who see it sexually interested in them”. And Israel has made immense use of these, by having female (and some male) IDF soldiers post suggestive TikToks in an effort to say ‘hey, we may be murderers but look at how hot we are!’
Why did one photo bother Israel so much?
Now this may seem to be a bit of a stretch, and given the immense ‘love’ that I bear for Israel you may think I’m off my rocker. While that may be so, I’m not exaggerating. Google ‘Israel thirst trap’ and you’ll find headlines like ‘Israeli Defence Forces soldiers embrace thirst traps’ from Rolling Stone magazine with an excerpt from the article saying: “…it’s fair to say that IDF soldier thirst traps are part and parcel with the official IDF’s general strategy to use social media to win hearts and minds across the globe.”
Prefer something more cerebral? Then you can read a paper by Marcus Bösch from Germany’s University of Münster and Tom Divon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that says much the same, except in academic terms. Titled Dancing in uniform: Thirst trap propaganda in military image wars on TikTok, the abstract of the paper reads: “Following the Hamas attacks on Oct 7, 2023, there was a surge in IDF soldiers posting ‘thirst trap’ videos, blending dance, seduction, and militarised imagery to humanise soldiers and amplify state narratives. Analysing 200 accounts and 500 videos, the study identifies a spectrum of different seduction strategies ranging from ‘cute’ soft power dynamics to the dramatisation of eroticised brutality.
The low-tier content features playful, non-militant aesthetics, while middle-tier content incorporates weapons and military settings to recontextualise platform trends and high-tier content involves explicit self-sexualisation and provocative imagery. These videos exploit TikTok’s participatory affordances and algorithmic visibility to maximise engagement while trivialising violence across varying intensities.”
Like all of Israel’s strategies it worked until it didn’t. Because there comes a time when the absolute scale of atrocity becomes impossible to conceal behind a veneer of sexuality. There comes a time when the demands of the flesh cannot overrule the verdict of the soul and in the past few years, that verdict has come in and the ugly face of Israel is on display, and not just on a magazine cover.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, April 20th, 2026
