Awdah Hathaleen, Palestinian activist and consultant for the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, has been murdered by an Israeli settler whose US sanctions were lifted by the Trump administration in early 2025.

Yinon Levi shot Hathaleen in the West Bank with an open firearm on Monday, 28th of August and was apprehended on the scene—following a house arrest release on Tuesday, with Israeli police statements taking Levi into custody for “questioning on suspicion of reckless conduct resulting in death and unlawful use of firearm.”

In the wake of genocidal violence, language becomes a frontline tool for the people who live in it. CNN’s headline of Hathaleen’s muder read: 

“Palestinian activist who worked on Oscar-winning film killed in West Bank”—not murdered, not shot, just “killed”—as if he tripped and fell into a bullet. The Israeli settler was described as “armed,” and the context of occupation and genocide was reduced to “violence”. 

This isn’t just semantics—this is strategy, a vocabulary of obfuscation turned linguistic laundering of violence. Because once you call it murder, you imply intent. Once you say occupation, you acknowledge power. And once you say genocide, you invoke a duty based on moral, legal, and historical standpoints. It begs the question, what happens when the world refuses to say it? When mainstream media and news outlets set the agenda of genocide simply as “violence”?

In late 2023, while bombs fell on Gaza, Instagram became a semiotic war zone. An academic analysis of 3,000+ hashtags used by global media accounts revealed two sharply divided realities. 

Pro-Palestine hashtags like #Gazagenocide, #FreePalestine, and #Ceasefirenow framed the violence as systemic, but these protest slogans were calls for recognition in the digital realm. Pro-Israel hashtags, on the other hand, such as #HamasisISIS, #Israelunderattack, #StandwithIsrael, reframed the narrative entirely. Israel became the victim per October 7th, 2023. Mass media coverage of Palestine zoomed in entirely to Hamas as the totality of Palestinian identity—not the people, history, and grief.

Even seemingly anodyne tags like #Gaza or #Israel wasn’t neutral at all. Their meaning mutated based on who used them and how. A post with #Gaza under a photo of rubble and children is not the same as #Gaza under a fiery explosion captioned “taking out the terrorists.” The signifiers are the same, yet the semantics were an entirely different portrait of intentional perspective.

When governments call massacres “operations,” when media calls bombings “strikes,” when settler colonialism becomes “clashes,” they’re sedating reality, using euphemism as a form of aggression. And this isn’t new; the Holocaust wasn’t called genocide until it was over. The Rohingya were called “migrants” before they were called “survivors”. Today, we see it take place in the genocide and occupation of the West Bank.

But in the grand scheme of things, why do semantics matter?

Because if we let the world call murder “conflicts”, if we let genocides pass unnamed, if we allow hashtags to do the heavy lifting while journalists and leaders play safe—or are silenced—we become complicit. Semantics matter because if we cannot say genocide, we cannot stop it. And if we cannot even say murder, what hope do we have of naming the dead?