Why Hamas Released That Video Now

The terrorist group calculated that the footage of emaciated hostage Evyatar David would shake Israelis and have no impact on anyone else. They were right.

Editor’s note: While I was putting the finishing touches on this column earlier today, I did an interview with CNN’s Audie Cornish in which I discussed some of its main points. I invite you to view it here. — A.M.

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As I sat down to write this piece, it occurred to me that perhaps I was wrong.

Perhaps, I thought, the video footage of emaciated 24-year-old hostage Evyatar David that horrified Israelis over the weekend had roused the journalistic sensibilities of a newspaper editor or two, beyond the usual suspects. Perhaps — just perhaps — footage of a starving Israeli Jew would be considered newsworthy.

So I scrolled through several hundred front pages posted on the website of the Freedom Forum, the free speech foundation that once operated the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

Only four newspapers published Evyatar’s skeletal image on Sunday’s front page. All were Israeli. The New York Post, which tends to be sympathetic to Israel and which did not appear on the Freedom Forum site, featured it, as well. Not a single other newspaper, anywhere in the United States or around the world, so much as mentioned the ghastly video — much less printed Evyatar’s image — on its front page.

Hamas got it right once again.

Throughout this war, the leaders of the terrorist group have displayed an understanding of mass psychology that has been nothing short of breathtaking. Decades of fighting Israel while molding global public opinion to their will have served them well. They know exactly what buttons to push to produce the desired results, what will be seen by whom, and what will go unnoticed. They know whose humanity will capture the world’s attention and whose has been effectively diminished to the point of insignificance.

At first glance, releasing this footage now may seem counterintuitive. Gaza has the world’s sympathy and attention. Public opinion around the world has shifted decisively against Israel. Why, then, release a video that displays Hamas’s abject cruelty, shows the deplorable state of the hostages it holds captive, and reminds the world why Israel is fighting and what it is up against?

But Hamas knew exactly what effect the video would have and what it would not, having carefully engineered global sympathies even as it thoroughly dehumanized Israelis in the eyes of the world.

Indeed, the past week and a half have been a masterclass in mass manipulation.

Militarily, Hamas is in the worst position it has been since the start of the war. Its forces decimated, its top commanders eliminated, it has been reduced to a guerrilla force. Its fighters scurry from one tunnel to the next, popping up here and there to attack Israeli troops before scrambling back underground amid the ruins. While it continues to control pockets of the Gaza Strip, its ability to govern has been vastly constrained.

As the war drags on and the humanitarian situation in the territory collapses, so, too, has popular support for the October 7 attacks that launched the current conflict: only 37% of Palestinians in Gaza now say Hamas was right to attack Israel, down from 71% in March 2024 (most Palestinians in the West Bank — who do not have to suffer the ongoing consequences of the October 7 attack — continue to support it). Only 23% of Palestinians in Gaza expect Hamas to emerge victorious, compared to 56% in March 2024. Nearly half — 48% — support demonstrations calling for Hamas to relinquish control over the Gaza Strip; a similar proportion, 47%, would support the expulsion of Hamas leaders in order to bring the war to a close.

Even the Arab League, which includes various countries hostile to Israel and sympathetic to Hamas, is now pressing the terrorist group to give up its control of Gaza. “In the context of ending the war… Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority,” read a declaration to which the 22-member League lent its signature during a gathering at the United Nations last week.

Its firepower diminished, its popularity waning, Hamas has turned to the one arena in which it knows it can still cause Israel pain — and from which it can potentially extract Israeli concessions: the war of public opinion.

The flurry of front-page photographs of sickly children, complemented by daily reports of deaths due to malnutrition, has aroused public fury against Israel to a degree not seen since the start of the war. World leaders have rushed to express their horror, threatening Israel with diplomatic consequences if it doesn’t take immediate steps to alleviate the suffering. Public opinion polls in some countries show that views of Israel have plummeted to their lowest levels ever recorded.

Unnoticed by some was the extent of Hamas’s involvement in the furor. While the humanitarian situation is indeed serious, and while there have been indications in recent weeks that it has been getting worse, the source of much of the information cited by journalists and government officials alike has been Hamas itself. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health — notorious for inventing statistics and fabricating events — has been pumping out a steady diet of daily casualty reports that cannot be independently verified and have, in fact, been repeatedly debunked. Several of the photographers credited with the disturbing images have been identified in the past as associated with Hamas; the photographer who captured the image of Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq — the small child who became a symbol of the plight of Gaza’s residents when his photo appeared on the front page of The New York Times and who was later revealed to be suffering from cerebral palsy — works for the state news service of Turkey, a country that maintains close ties to Hamas and harbors some of the group’s leaders.

Long experienced at causing and then exploiting Palestinian suffering for its own purposes, Hamas has already started capitalizing on the international uproar.

Responding to announcements by France, the U.K., Canada, and other countries that they will recognize Palestinian statehood next month, senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad could barely contain his glee. “The initiative by several countries to recognize a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of October 7,” he told Al Jazeera. “We proved that victory over Israel is not impossible, and our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian dignity.” Sensing a moment of international support and Israeli weakness, Hamas is also leveraging the crisis to harden its negotiating stance, saying it won’t agree to disarm until a Palestinian state “with Jerusalem as its capital” is established.

But no less important an audience is the Israeli public.

To Israelis, the events of the past week and a half have been a one-two punch. The global uproar sparked by the disturbing images of children in Gaza has left Israelis more concerned than ever about the diplomatic ramifications of continuing the war and has increased pressure on the government to bring it to a close. A survey conducted in May found that nearly two thirds of Israelis — 64% — are concerned that Israel could find itself internationally isolated; the events of recent weeks will almost certainly cause that number to rise.

Sensing a shift in Israeli sentiment, Hamas lost little time in releasing the video of Evyatar David, which followed Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s release of a macabre video of 21-year-old hostage Rom Braslavski (with whom the group claims it has since lost contact).

In the Hamas footage, a skeletal Evyatar speaks about going without food and with minimal water for days on end, noting how thin and weak he has become. In one scene, he is shown slowly digging what he says is his grave, in what appears to be a Hamas tunnel. “Time is running out,” he tells the camera. “You are the only ones who can end this.” He then collapses in tears, still holding the shovel upright.

The move had the intended, predictable effect.

“For me and for my family, it’s too late. Yotam won’t return,” wrote Iris Haim, mother of slain hostage Yotam Haim, in a heartbreaking Facebook post on Saturday. “Yes, we have to agree to surrender. Yes — surrender. I’m not afraid of that word, because surrender is less terrible than letting these children die of hunger.”

“Surrender isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” she wrote in a subsequent post. “Surrender isn’t an admission of failure. Surrender is concession for lack of options. The images of Evyatar and Rom leave us no other options. They cannot die there.”

Later Saturday evening, during the weekly demonstration at Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, Evyatar’s brother, Ilay, said Hamas was conducting “live hunger experiments” on the hostages.

“Hamas is using Evyatar in one of the most horrific and calculated campaigns imaginable,” he told the crowd. “They are starving him deliberately, systematically using his agonizing suffering as a twisted tool for their depraved propaganda.”

“They are on the absolute brink of death,” he said of the hostages. “To remain silent now is to be complicit in their slow, agonizing death.”

“Before Anything Else — Save the Starved Hostages,” read the headline of a Monday commentary piece by Yediot Ahronoth’s veteran military correspondent, Ron Ben-Yishai. “The situation demands an immediate shift in Israel’s national priorities and an urgent act of rescue. The government and the prime minister must make lifesaving decisions before anything else,” he wrote, capturing the feelings of many Israelis as he compared the hostages to the Muselmänner — the emaciated concentration camp prisoners regarded as living dead during the Holocaust.

Equally predictable was the scant coverage the video received in the international media. While leading media outlets mentioned it, as noted above, virtually none featured Evyatar’s image on either the front pages of their print editions or the homepages of their websites, choosing instead to bury it in the flurry of coverage of the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Several government officials tweeted about it. None held press conferences or threatened dramatic diplomatic repercussions as they had done just one week earlier.

Hamas has successfully penetrated both the Israeli psyche and global sentiment. In Israel, it is playing on Israelis’ rawest emotions and leveraging the war’s deep unpopularity to extract concessions from a government that is being increasingly pressed by both its citizenry and its allies. Internationally, it is exploiting the suffering of innocent Palestinians — for which it is largely responsible and which it exacerbates at will — and the sympathies of well-meaning national publics to strengthen its standing and increase its power, secure in the knowledge that open displays of its cruelty will leave no impression at all.

To some, the sum total of Hamas’s moves in recent weeks, and the international response thereto, lead to an unmistakable conclusion.

“Hamas’s message is clear — they own you,” wrote Iranian activist Elica Le Bon. “They’re showing you that while the world is screaming from the rooftops that we must speak out about starvation in Gaza, they can show you the cruelest, highest form of international starvation in ruthless captivity and nobody will bat an eyelid.”

“The worldview of ordinary people has been irrevocably distorted, and Jews and Israelis have been thoroughly, totally, and completely dehumanized — just as we planned all along,” she continued, channeling Hamas.

“This image was Hamas’s message to the western world: ‘We haven’t just taken Israelis captive, we’ve taken your minds hostage, too. We own you. We’ve won.’

“And they’re not wrong.”

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