Hamas’s Theater of the Macabre

[Pelican Press 0]

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******’s Theater of the Macabre

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, ****** 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

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that the two children had been

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by their captors and that the woman’s body

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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 ****** on Thursday,”

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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.”

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The truth is, body switching might be new to this conflict, but macabre theatrics are not. Since the day ****** invaded southern Israel and used GoPro cameras and phones to document its massacres—including

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the execution of a grandmother to her

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page—the group has been staging a show for the world to see. Dressing its sadism in the flimsy disguise of ************ nationalism—a ruse that has seemingly fooled more Western college students than

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—****** 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

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that she had been forced by her ****** 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. ****** subsequently released a blurry image that it claimed was of a female hostage blown up by Israel. The woman had Gilboa’s tattoo. ************ Islamic ******, another terror group that joined ****** in its October 7 assault, similarly falsely

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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, ****** quietly handed over another body that was identified as actually belonging to Shiri Bibas, claiming it was just a “

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.” This may well be true: Shiri and her children were taken captive on October 7 by the

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, a small armed group that presumably retained custody of their bodies. When the trio turned up dead, ****** 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, ****** 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

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last month, the ****** 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

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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

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, flanked by obviously well-fed ****** gunmen.

Yarden Bibas, husband of Shiri and father of the slain boys, was

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to wave limply to an assembled crowd at his February 1 release, even as ****** 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

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by a masked cameraman to kiss his captors onstage, resulting in a viral

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. Getty distributed a

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from this stunt that multiple

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republished without caveat or disclosure. Finally, ****** brought two unreleased hostages to Saturday’s ceremony, made them watch as their countrymen were freed, and then

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a propaganda clip of them begging for their own lives.

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But perhaps most chilling was the release of a hostage ****** chose not to humiliate. For nearly 10 years, the group has imprisoned Hisham al-Sayed, a mentally ill ******* 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

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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.” ****** 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. “****** 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.”

******’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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#Hamass #Theater #Macabre

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