Despite prominent attention to the nature of the state in the social sciences, the place of language in creating and maintaining the state remains an emerging area of research. The analysis that follows investigates indeterminacy and illegibility in messages disseminated by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. This analysis highlights the ways in which linguistic indeterminacy is used as a tool by the state in controlling populations at its margins, while investigating the role of language in reproducing the state through the circulation of texts.