The picture from Gaza seemed like so many other conflict zone photos -- until you began to notice the details.
The lifeless arm of a Palestinian boy cradled by an adult running across the beach. The sand studded with what looks like brush, but is really pieces of something shattered. A small child lies face down in the sand, legs jutting out at odd angles, seemingly struck dead.
Tyler Hicks/@nytimes pic.twitter.com/KMRP8YzGRz— Carlos Saul Duque (@saulduque) July 17, 2014
The picture, shot by the New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, quickly became one of the most discussed pictures of the conflict. With heartbreaking clarity, it showed the faces of a few of the Palestinian civilian victims killed by Israeli rockets, and quickly ricocheted around Twitter and Facebook.
The Gaza offensive, now in its second and deadliest week, plays out in vivid detail on social media, with bombings and killings documented on the ground in near-real time. And for many, the decades-long conflict can now be seen through the eyes of those who live there.
Since July 8, more than 600 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, in Israel's offensive that it says is intended to root out Hamas militants who are firing rockets across the border. On the Israeli side, at least 25 soldiers and two civilians have been killed.
Reports of Palestinian civilian deaths and the destruction of homes and hospitals have spread rapidly on Twitter and Facebook. As of this writing, Twitter users have tweeted the hashtag #GazaUnderAttack more than 4 million times over the past month. By comparison, the hashtag #IsraelUnderFire has been used less than 200,000 times.
Soldiers killing soldiers = war! Soldiers killing children and innocent unarmed civilians = barbarity #GazaUnderAttack— Amal Murtaja (@hopeingaza) July 21, 2014
Paul Mason, economics editor at Channel 4 News in London, wrote of learning about an Israeli attack that killed several civilians through Twitter as people began tweeting about "bodies lying on the ground" -- an incident quickly corroborated by journalists in Gaza.
Soon after the news broke of the intense battle in Shijaiyah, the Israeli Defense Forces tweeted this:
Shuja'iya is a civilian area where Hamas places its rockets, tunnels and command centers.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 20, 2014
Days ago, we warned civilians in Shuja'iya to evacuate. Hamas ordered them to stay. Hamas put them in the line of fire.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 20, 2014
Since July 8, Hamas has fired over 140 rockets at Israel from Shuja'iya.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) July 20, 2014
"Nothing in those three tweets constitutes either a defense of, or explanation for, the killing of tens of non-combatants," Mason wrote. "But in the space between them, anybody following the Gaza conflict from both sides would have seen tens of independently shot images and accounts of civilian death and the destruction of housing and civilian infrastructure. The incident shows who is winning the social media war over Gaza. It is evidence of a massive change in the balance of power between social media and the old, hierarchical media channels we used to rely on to understand wars."
The change -- and its implications for the public's understanding of the conflict -- has also been noticed by other observers of the region.
“Something that [journalists] might have said to friends at a bar now goes out on Twitter," David Pollock, an Arab-Israeli relations expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Mashable.
There are more journalists on the ground this time around, compared to 2009, when Israel launched a major military campaign into Gaza and the IDF prevented foreign media from entering the territory. Back then, the IDF also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, allowing few cellphone photographs to appear outside Gaza, according to The New York Times.
Over the past few weeks, the bloodshed and panic that journalists in Gaza have captured in photos and video tell vivid stories -- many of them centering on children as the victims of this conflict.
“I am getting a lot of media calls about children, which I don’t remember from previous [conflicts]," Bill Van Esveld, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is based in Jerusalem, told Mashable. “It seems like an indicator that if you're asking questions about children, you’re covering the humanitarian side of the story.”
Children and teenagers caught between the sides have been central to the conflict from the start. In June, three Israeli teenagers were abducted and discovered dead after an 18-day search. A Palestinian boy was soon kidnapped and brutally murdered in an apparent revenge killing. His cousin, a Palestinian-American, was allegedly severely beaten by Israeli police.
But only Palestinian children have been killed following the teenagers' deaths.
Israel says Hamas fighters are hiding among Palestinian civilians. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only added fuel to the fire in the debate over civilian deaths when he said on Sunday on CNN that Hamas is using the images of "telegenically dead" civilians to further damage Israel's public image.
As Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in New York magazine: "If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television, then he should stop killing so many of them."
However, focusing solely on the humanitarian side of the story can also provide a warped view of the conflict, said Pollock, the Arab-Israeli relations expert. While he bemoaned the loss of civilians, he said a relentless focus on the conflict's humanitarian cost can skirt the political aspects of a fight in which both have done their part to trample hopes for peace through the years.
"I think [covering human interest stories] kind of ignores some of the larger issues and it sometimes even distorts the meaning of what’s going on," he said.
Certainly, the military wing of Hamas has been trying to kill people, too. Since the conflict began, the militants have sent a stream of rockets toward Israel. But Israel's rocket interceptor, known as the Iron Dome, prevents the vast majority of those warheads from doing any damage.
Across the border, Palestinians have little with which to defend themselves against Israeli warheads and fighter jets.
we will never forgive israel for breaking the hearts of our mothers! Never forgive, never forget! #GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/RGS7er4ott— Gaza Writes Back (@ThisIsGaZa) July 21, 2014
VIDEO: The Deadliest Days of the Gaza Conflict