“There’s something about this ‘uninvolved,’ there’s something passive about it,” Mr. Keret said. “You admit that he is not somebody who is trying to destroy you, but you don’t give him any other identification. It was not a child who wanted to learn how to play the piano,” he said, adding, “it was just somebody who didn’t shoot at us.”

There is a long history here of such euphemisms. The journalist Amos Elon called it “word laundry,” and David Grossman explored the phenomenon in “The Yellow Wind,” his 1987 study of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. “A society in crisis forges for itself a new vocabulary,” he wrote, using “words that no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.”

Dalia Gavriely-Nuri, an expert in the discourse of war who is affiliated with universities in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, noted that the Hebrew name for the current operation translates as “strong cliff” — a reference to nature, like the names of 35 percent of Israeli military campaigns since the state’s establishment in 1948, according to her research.

“Using natural forces, it removes the responsibility of leaders, of citizens,” she said. “Nobody is responsible when you are sitting under, let’s say, a tsunami or earthquake. This is a psychological process that helps the people that are involved in a conflict or an operation to survive the situation.”

Social media has put the propaganda war on steroids.

“You’re seeing anger and frustration, you’re seeing sorrow and empathy, and you’re also seeing a wide currency of videos, photos, infographics, emergent hashtags, memes,” said William Youmans, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University who specializes in the Middle East. “You read over-triumphalist accounts. It can almost sound like they’re rooting for different sports teams, and cheering their side on. That’s very different from the actual suffering that’s going on.”