The bedrock of international humanitarian law is arguably the principle of distinction, which highlights the importance of distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants during war. Accordingly, when violence in conflict zones becomes the object of public and legal scrutiny, we often witness a legal-visual investigation about the degree of distinction adopted by the actors in the battlefield. Given the contemporary landscape of armed conflict and the increasing rate of civilian deaths, analyzing the way distinction is produced, its epistemic conditions of possibility, as well as its political and ethical objectives is both necessary and urgent. Using the US drone wars in Pakistan and Yemen as a case study, the paper focuses on the way in which the principle of distinction has become a productive force that not only distinguishes among people within battlespaces, but also helps produce legal figures such as "human shields" and "enemies killed in action." More specifically, it interrogates two different aspects informing the relationship among distinction, visibility, and the ethics of violence to show that the principle of distinction has been mobilized in Pakistan and Yemen to legitimize the killing of civilians during war, rather than as a means of protecting them. First, it uses drone warfare in the Middle East to show how new technologies help expand that which is observable. Second, it describes how the legal principle of distinction, which originated in the humanist tradition, currently distinguishes people by detecting so-called anomalies in the relations among multiple data points and translates them into "patterns of behavior." Not unlike the reconfiguring of the human body through its reconceptualization as a molecular entity, contemporary technologies of distinction use a post humanist gaze to re-conceptualize the human body as part of a digitized disposition matrix that is linked to specific legal figures. Taking into account the increasing "civilianization of armed conflicts" in the Middle East, it is vital to make sense of the apparatus of distinction not only for understanding how militaries fight in civilian spaces, but also for understanding precisely how international law helps produce the ethics of violence.