Hamas’s Theater of the Macabre
The terrorist group has dragooned its hostages, Jewish and
not, into perverse performance art.
February 25, 2025, 7
AM ET
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.
THESE PIGS ARE INSANE FANATICS
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.
Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism
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.
