The conflict between Israel and the Islamic jihadists who control Gaza can be hard to understand. But there’s a simple formula that explains it: maximum suffering = maximum benefit for Hamas.

The key to Hamas’s strategy is salience bias: our brains are hard-wired to give more weight to things that provoke an emotional response (like photos of anguished civilians) than things that require rational analysis (like numbers and historical evidence).

In other words, Gaza’s leaders manipulate global public opinion by deliberately maximizing casualties among their own population. They use harrowing imagery to gain sympathy for their cause, despite the fact that their cause is the destruction of the Middle East’s only democracy and the establishment of an openly mysoginist, racist, homophobic, Islamic theocracy in its place.

Seeing is believing

In prior eras, the toll of war - what is euphemistically referred to as “collateral damage” - was largely hidden from view.

In 1945, people in the USA read that the Allies had bombed the German city of Dresden, and saw a few photos of destroyed buildings. They were not, however, inundated with images of the tens of thousands of German women, children, and elderly people that were incinerated, crushed, and maimed by Allied bombs. If they had been, it is easy to imagine that public support for Churchill’s “terror bombing” strategy might have waned substantially.

Likewise, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuked by the USA, the Western press did not publish endless photos of the charred remains of Japanese women and children. Newsreels did not feature footage of Japanese civilians slowly dying agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning.

This changed during the 1970s. Unrestricted access to the combat zone allowed journalists to capture photos of Vietnamese civilians fleeing Napalm attacks and other violence. The broad distribution of these images is widely considered to have been a contributing factor in the anti-war movement that undermined the Johnson administration and caused widespread unrest in US cities.

As a direct consequence of this experience, subsequent US administrations have strictly limited where and when journalists are permitted to observe conflict. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the broader War on Terror, the general public heard about drone strikes on villages and wedding parties, but they didn’t see the aftermath. Consequently, public outrage was muted.

Indeed, it was only when photos emerged of suspected terrorists being mistreated by US military personnel in Abu Ghraib prison that the US public voiced its displeasure. Even though the prisoners were accused of involvement in the 9/11 attack, the sight of them being humiliated was salient enough to garner sympathy for them, and to undermine the American will to continue fighting.

The leaders of Hamas are well aware of this history.

They also know that the Judeo-Christian approach to suffering is very different from their own. While Jews and Christians tend to believe that laying down one’s life is only justified if it is a choice made willingly to save the lives of others, the Islamic concept of the shahid (martyr) specifically includes those who die while murdering others. This is not empty talk: in both Gaza and the West Bank, the families of those who die while trying to kill Jews are financially rewarded by their government.

For the leaders of Hamas, it’s a win-win proposition. The more the people bleed, the more foreign aid money the leaders can embezzle. The hungrier the people are, the more the leaders can raise the price of food. The more the leaders post images of women and children that they used as human shields for their fighters, the more public opinion turns against the enemy they’ve sworn to destroy.

Incidentally, the strategy is a highly profitable one too: the top three leaders of Hamas, which is part of the Muslim Brotherhood network of Islamic jihadist organizations that blankets the Middle East and North Africa, have an estimated net worth of $11 billion. (For comparison, global pop superstar Taylor Swift has a net worth of $1 billion.)

Obviously, not all residents of Gaza feel this way. The most recent poll shows that 57% of Gazans still support Hamas, but an increasing number are expressing dissatisfaction. They know that they are being exploited by brutal leaders who, incidentally, have embezzled billions of dollars in foreign aid and live far from the deprivation of their constituents.

Nonetheless, consistency works on Westerners too. Those who have decided to see Israel as the villain in the Middle East view every heart-rending image from Gaza as evidence of Jewish brutality. They don’t realize that, standing just out of view, are the ruthless Islamist leaders who profit from the suffering of their own people.