It’s not often a book argues that a real-world war was orchestrated through a daytime soap opera to psychologically target its author. But that’s the extraordinary claim Banafsheh Zia makes in Operation Cast Lead: The Case.

Zia posits that an armed conflict in Gaza was actually “a design…to use military force to coerce a person into committing a certain act against their will.” Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2009, Zia dismisses the diagnosis as “only a label to conceal the truth of what happened.” She asserts that a romance storyline on General Hospital was deliberately synchronized with the 2008-2009 war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and that the war, also known as Operation Cast Lead, “was initiated to instill fear in and ‘compel’ a person into a ‘surrender,’ to achieve a political outcome”—that person being Zia herself.

Zia tells of becoming obsessed with General Hospital‘s romance between Sonny and Kate during the Gaza conflict, and convinced that her posts on a fan forum somehow influenced both the soap opera’s storyline and the actual military operations in the Middle East. The book makes this case through detailed recountings of General Hospital plot points alongside parallel geopolitical events, such as a marriage proposal on the show which “coincided with the establishment of a truce between Hamas…and the government of Israel.”

As a political exposé, the book is unpersuasive, failing to offer any verifiable evidence—the author admits that “direct evidence is not available”—and basing its argument on interpretations of soap opera scenes, online rumors, and coincidences. Additionally, its flat, clinical, and repetitive writing makes for an arduous experience, and as a seemingly unfiltered memoir of mental breakdown, it’s a disturbing glimpse into a troubled mind.

The book has merit, however, in what it reveals—even if unintentionally: about the stories we build to make sense of a chaotic world that increasingly blurs the lines between fiction and reality.