Hamas's Theater of the Macabre

The Atlantic

25-02-2025

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.
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.