Israel has thrown its own tech industry under a bus again with a pathetic stunt in Gaza, but its backfired deservedly. Right, so you can always tell when a state stops pretending it cares about civilian life, because it starts doing things even its own lies can’t cover, and Israel has been doing that again in Gaza, blocking antibiotics and dialysis supplies while somehow letting gold-plated iPhones glide straight through the crossing. You don’t need a grand theory to see what’s going on there; you just need the memory of Lebanon, where pagers packed with explosives maimed thousands of people and Israel admitted it later, and the warnings from digital-rights groups about Israeli-authored software buried inside mass-market Samsung phones across the region. So when Gaza gets flooded with smartphones in the middle of a medical blockade, of course people think something’s off. That’s not paranoia. That’s what happens when a state burns its own credibility and keeps lighting matches. Right, so you can always tell what a state really cares about by what it lets into a besieged territory and what it keeps out, because a blockade is not an accident, it’s a policy written in lorries and cargo lists, and Israel has made that brutally clear over Gaza again. Essential medicines, IV fluids, antibiotics, dialysis consumables, surgical kit, the things that actually keep people alive, not to mention other basics from food to hygiene products, are still being blocked or throttled at the crossings, while, at the same time, luxury foodstuffs and high-end consumer electronics are getting in, including gold-plated iPhones and whole consignments of new smartphones that nobody under bombardment and famine conditions has asked for.