Navigating belief and power: a critical analysis of socio-religious and political narratives in Pakistan amidst the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Gaza escalation in Pakistan’s recent history, the 2023–2025, triggered one of the most sustained waves of religiously framed mobilization. This article probes how during this period socio-religious discourse shaped the public sentiment, the political critique, and the digital activism. By integrating Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with computational sentiment analysis, the study analyzed 1,000 social media posts (X, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube) and 25 televised news segments collected between October 2023 and April 2025. Through the NVivo-based thematic coding six dominant frames Religious Obligation and Ummah, Martyrdom and Shahadat, Divine Justice and Zulm, Boycott Campaigns, Political Betrayal and Elite Critique and Misinformation and Public Reaction were discovered. Results show that religious discourse provided a moral vocabulary for solidarity and resistance which marginalized the dissent and enabled the misinformation. Further, for Urdu-English code-mixing the adaptation of VADER sentiment analysis indicated that 62% of discourse carried negative affect dominated by grief, outrage and anger; 25% was positive (unity and resilience); and 13% was neutral. Employing Social Identity, Framing and Political Opportunity Theories, the study argues that Pakistan’s digital religiosity demonstrates religion’s dual role as a source of moral action and an ideological closure which simultaneously empowers collective resistance and constrains pluralistic debate.