Just prior to the holiday weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood with Sabine Taasa, whose son, Or, and husband, Gil, were murdered by Hamas on October 7. Two other sons were injured in the attacks. Taasa and Netanyahu were presenting footage from a security camera, which catches Gil’s death and the terrorists’ callous treatment of the boys, both of whom were injured.
The viewer sees Gil and his sons run into a shelter and a terrorist throw a grenade into the shelter after them. Gil appears to have shielded his sons from the explosion, which killed him immediately. We see Gil’s body in a corner of the video after the explosion, and then see the two boys run back to the house.
The video is just now being approved for wide release outside of Israel by Taasa as a reminder of why this war began and why it continues, as a steady stream of Hamas war porn seeks to paint the Jewish state as an evil, murderous force. But the video’s release also shows the built-in advantage that Hamas has. After all, the Taasa footage can only be shown because it is unrepresentative of the rest of the unreleased October 7 footage in that it isn’t shockingly gory.
Israel has provided to journalists and politicians and other officials who request it the most brutal footage from that day. But it has not been packaged into made-for-social-media clips of Hamas’s barbarity. The inhumanity of these scenes of Hamas’s actions, and the sheer volume of such videos—many of which Hamas took themselves—is nearly incomprehensible. And so the question has been raised from the beginning of the war: Why didn’t the Israeli government show all this footage, so that the world could understand the demonic forces guiding Hamas’s death cult?
There is no one single answer to this question. One popular suggestion is that the Israeli military, and in fact the Israeli public, would be unrestrainable if it saw the worst of Hamas’s crimes against Israeli civilians. Contrary to the parade of lies about Israel’s prosecution of this war, the IDF has shown superhuman restraint and patience. The military took its time, for example, evacuating a million Palestinians from Rafah before going in to clear it of Hamas fighters and smuggling tunnels. The nearly 1:1 casualty ratio of civilians to combatants is unheard-of in urban warfare. The numbers don’t lie (hard as Hamas might try to make them)—there has almost certainly never been stronger protection of noncombatants in a dense urban war theater like this.
How does Hamas deal with this fact from a public-relations perspective? After all, if Israel had any interest in carrying out a genocide, it would have happened long ago: The bombs Israel dropped on evacuated neighborhoods would have been dropped on those neighborhoods before they were cleared of people. Israel is preparing mobile medical facilities and other infrastructure for those leaving Gaza City ahead of the IDF’s long-announced operation there. Humanitarian aid has been rolling in, just as it has been for most of the war. The death of any civilian in a combat zone is tragic, but no one in his right mind could possibly compare it to what viewers saw on the Taasa video: the intentional murder of a father in front of his sons, the maiming of those sons, and the swaggering cruelty of forcing them to sit and spill blood and tears while the terrorists looked for something to drink.
The answer is that Hamas plays the only card it has. While Hamas propagandists disseminate plenty of hoaxes, there is also something damning about the terror group’s use of the actual war dead. As Jeffrey Goldberg wrote from personal experience in 2009: “Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble — and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I’ve seen in my life. And it’s typical of Hamas.”
Could Israelis, theoretically, play a similar game? Sure, but it would require a level of disrespect for the victims and for Israeli society that it thankfully isn’t capable of even attempting. Indeed, the full extent of some of Hamas’s crimes will never be known because Israeli victims are recovered and buried and shown honor and dignity.
So the lesson of the Taasa video is this: It is not what is shown, but what can’t be shown that demonstrates what Israelis are up against. And not just Israelis, but all of us in the West, as Hamas propaganda permeates our media and our schools. Losing such propaganda wars is the price we all pay for maintaining a civilization worth defending.
