By Yair Rosenberg
Tuesday, February 25, 2025
At first, Thursday’s festivities in Gaza seemed like just
another sordid spectacle in a 16-month exhibition of debasement. In front of a
raucous crowd, Hamas gunmen displayed coffins containing the remains of four
Israelis: an octagenarian peace activist named Oded Lifshitz, child hostages
Ariel and Kfir Bibas—ages 4 years and nine months, respectively, when
kidnapped—and their mother, Shiri. A label affixed to the latter’s coffin
declared that she had been “arrested” on October 7, presumably for the crime of
existing while Jewish. All four corpses were handed over to the Red Cross for
transfer to Israel as part of the ongoing cease-fire deal.
Then Israeli coroners concluded
that the two children had been murdered
by their captors and that the woman’s body wasn’t
their mother’s after all. A moment of particularly acute horror briefly
broke through the headlines that have been dominated by President Donald
Trump’s turn on Ukraine. “I condemn the parading of bodies and displaying of
the coffins of the deceased Israeli hostages by Hamas on Thursday,” declared United
Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, an otherwise relentless critic of
Israel. “Any handover of the remains of the deceased must comply with the
prohibition of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
The truth is, body switching might be new to this
conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day Hamas invaded southern
Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including uploading
the execution of a grandmother to her Facebook page—the group has been staging
a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of
Palestinian nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college
students than residents
of Gaza—Hamas
has attempted to win a perverse propaganda war even as it has lost the actual
war in lopsided fashion, to the horrific devastation of Gaza’s civilian
population.
Some of these efforts are only now coming to light. In
January, the 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa was released from captivity in
one of the first exchanges under the current cease-fire deal. She revealed
that she had been forced by her Hamas jailers to stage her own demise. “Today
we are filming you dead,” one reportedly told her, compelling her to pose in
powder and debris as though she’d been killed in an Israeli air strike. Hamas
subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage
blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa’s tattoo. Palestinian Islamic Jihad,
another terror group that joined Hamas in its October 7 assault, similarly
falsely claimed
that the 76-year-old hostage Hanna Katzir had died, only to release her in a
November 2023 exchange.
The Bibas debacle had no such bittersweet ending. On
Friday, Hamas quietly handed over another body that was identified as actually
belonging to Shiri Bibas, claiming it was just a “mix-up.”
This may well be true: Shiri and her children were taken captive on October 7
by the Mujahideen
Brigades, a small armed group that presumably retained custody of their
bodies. When the trio turned up dead, Hamas might have had little notion of
exactly what happened to them. Of course, this did not stop the group from
claiming, without evidence, that Israel had killed the three hostages in an air
strike, as though this would somehow make the people responsible for the deaths
of the snatched children someone other than the child-snatchers. As it turned
out, Hamas didn’t even have the right bodies, let alone any insight into their
manner of death, and was seemingly piling deception upon its depravity.
With the establishment of an unstable cease-fire
last month, the Hamas show has taken to broadcasting scenes of public
humiliation of Israeli hostages to the world via Al Jazeera and social media.
Eli Sharabi, 52, was compelled
to speak at his release about how he looked forward to reuniting with his wife
and daughters—his captors knew, but didn’t tell him, that they had been
murdered on October 7. Sharabi was released alongside two other hostages in emaciated
condition, flanked by obviously well-fed Hamas gunmen.
Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of the slain
boys, was forced
to wave limply to an assembled crowd at his February 1 release, even as Hamas
kept the fate and bodies of his family from him. And on Saturday, just two days
after the bizarre Bibas body swap, 22-year-old Omer Shem Tov was instructed
by a masked cameraman to kiss his captors onstage, resulting in a viral social-media
clip. Getty distributed a photo
from this stunt that multiple media
outlets
republished without caveat or disclosure. Finally, Hamas brought two unreleased
hostages to Saturday’s ceremony, made them watch as their countrymen were
freed, and then released
a propaganda clip of them begging for their own lives.
But perhaps most chilling was the release of a hostage
Hamas chose not to humiliate. For nearly 10 years, the group has imprisoned
Hisham al-Sayed, a mentally ill Muslim Bedouin Israeli civilian who wandered
into Gaza. As part of Saturday’s exchange, the terrorist group quietly released
him without fanfare to the Red Cross, transferring the 37-year-old back to
Israel sans ceremony or jeering crowds. It quickly became clear why. After
reuniting with his son, al-Sayed’s father, Sha’aban, gave a devastating
account to the press about his condition.
“He is broken,” the elder al-Sayed said. “He says a lot
of incomprehensible things. He speaks in a whisper, maybe out of fear. I
believe he is in a state of mental torture.” Hamas officials had previously
told Al Jazeera that the group had handed over al-Sayed without the usual
hoopla out of respect for the Arabs of Israel. “Hamas are liars,” retorted the
father. “They didn’t want people to see what state he was in, and that’s why
there was no ceremony. If they had any respect for people, they would have released
him a long time ago.”
Hamas’s hostage propaganda is blunt and transparently
self-serving. And like all theatrical performances, it requires a certain
suspension of disbelief. Unlike most, however, it also requires a suspension of
belief in humanity.
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