As Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli villages outside Gaza on the morning of October 7th, killing roughly fourteen hundred people, some paused to take videos of themselves with Jewish children at Kibbutz Holit. In one piece of footage, a fighter in an Adidas T-shirt vigorously pats the back of a crying baby who is pressed against his shoulder—the same shoulder carrying his Kalashnikov. Another fighter, wearing a camouflage uniform, bandages the foot of an Israeli boy of toddler age, then puts the boy on his lap while jerking the crying baby back and forth in a stroller. A camera zooms in on the confused face of the boy as an unseen fighter, speaking broken English, instructs him to repeat the Arabic word meaning “in the name of God.” “Say bismillah,” the fighter says. The boy complies, in a soft Hebrew accent.
Hamas released the bismillah video on a Telegram channel six days after the attack. At a moment when the Western news media, and some major Arab outlets, were full of reports about the many civilians who were slaughtered, and Israeli officials were likening Hamas to ISIS, the footage was apparently Hamas’s rebuttal. At one point in the video, a masked fighter holds up the two children and addresses the camera: “Look at the mercy in our hearts. These kids—we didn’t kill them like you do.” (At least six children died from rocket fire on October 7th, and Israel’s Channel 12 has named at least nineteen others killed by militants.)
If Hamas meant to humanize its fighters to audiences in Israel or the West, the video was stunningly counterproductive. The group’s propagandists hid the identity of the fighters by blurring out their faces and, in most scenes, distorting their voices. The resulting faceless growls made them look and sound only more monstrous. The Kalashnikovs next to the children, the ungentle pushing of the stroller, the Jewish child goaded into Muslim prayer, the absence of the boys’ parents—the whole scene was alarming. (The children turned out to be brothers: Negev, who is three, and Eshel, who is about five months old. Their mother was killed in the raid, and their father was away. Hamas brought the children into Gaza, but released them almost immediately.)
Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli intelligence official who specializes in analyzing Palestinian media, told us that the bismillah video “demonstrates Hamas’s arrogance toward the West—that they think all Westerners are stupid, that, if they show images of these barbarian terrorists holding babies and hugging them, people in the West will say, ‘Oh, they are so sweet. We were wrong about them!’ It’s ridiculous.” Many Israelis have observed that their government’s vulnerability to the October 7th attack showed a profound failure to understand Hamas. Milshtein argued that Hamas’s release of the bismillah footage, which displays little comprehension of the audience in Israel and the West, proved that the misunderstanding was mutual.
Yet to Palestinians and other Arab viewers—a very different audience, and one that is more important to Hamas—the awkward bismillah video served its purpose. It was posted to Al Jazeera’s Facebook page for Egypt, and has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. Nearly seventy-five thousand viewers have liked it, and nearly three thousand have left comments, many of them admiring. One commenter praised “the morals of the fighters of the Islamic resistance.”
Three days later, another surreal video appeared, this one from an Israeli hostage who identifies herself as a twenty-one-year-old named Mia Shem. In the footage, her dazed eyes seemingly dart to read cue cards as she delivers a statement about the medical care that Hamas has provided for a serious wound to her arm. “They are taking care of me and giving me medicines, everything is fine,” she says flatly, avoiding the subject of who caused her injury in the first place. Since then, Hamas has released videos showing a few handovers of released hostages—including one in which an elderly Jewish Israeli bids “shalom” to her Palestinian captor.
However unpersuasive or ham-fisted such propaganda might seem in the West, Ghaith al-Omari—a former adviser to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and a longtime opponent of Hamas—told us that such videos had convinced many Arabs that the group’s fighters, unlike ISIS, “are humane and respect Islamic laws of war.” He added, “It has resonated throughout the Arab world. This is now the line you see not only in Hamas media but in most Arab media, in Jordan, Egypt, and North Africa. The dominant narrative has become the narrative of Hamas.”
Hamas began shaping that narrative moments after its fighters streamed through the breached barriers surrounding Gaza. As the assault unfolded, a split screen on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV network juxtaposed footage of burning cars in Israeli towns with a video of a cluster of young Israeli men whose arms are tied behind their backs. A news anchor, addressing Palestinians everywhere, declared, “This picture is your picture, this might is your might, this flood is your flood, and this blessed action is for all of you!”
A review of Hamas’s propaganda on October 7th makes clear that a major objective of the group’s assault was to spark a broader uprising among the Palestinians of the West Bank. After the news anchor delivered the “blessed action” soliloquy, the network cut to a recorded message from Saleh al-Arouri, the bellicose deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau, who explicitly urged Palestinians to rise up against both the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the soldiers protecting them. The Israeli military “won’t be able to attend to confrontations on other fronts,” Arouri said. “After today, no one can hold back his rifle, bullet, pistol, knife, car, or Molotov cocktail.” Similar calls for an uprising in the West Bank were made in statements released during the attack by the Hamas military commander Mohammed al-Deif and by the masked Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida. The statements were broadcast repeatedly on Al-Aqsa TV and on Al Jazeera.
Although no West Bank uprising materialized, Hamas propagandists were still revelling days later in a triumph measured in bloodshed. On October 9th, as Israel was successfully repelling the last remaining Palestinian fighters from its territory, Shadi Asfour, a reporter for Al-Aqsa TV, announced from a hospital inside the Strip that “the men of the resistance are still clashing right now on the lands usurped in 1948, in the occupied interior, and reports coming from those lands are that the morale is very high.” Israeli officials at the time had confirmed the deaths of more than seven hundred citizens. “We know that these numbers are certainly false,” Asfour said. “It will soon be acknowledged that the numbers are rising!”
Observers on all sides of the conflict agree that Israel’s launch of a brutal air campaign against Gaza has rallied sympathy for the Strip’s beleaguered residents and buttressed Hamas’s story of heroic resistance. Talal Okal, a columnist in Gaza for the Ramallah-based newspaper Al-Ayyam, said of the media war, “Honestly and objectively, Israel defeated itself.”
But Al Jazeera, owned by the rulers of Qatar, has done the most to disseminate images of the devastation caused by the air strikes. The network, which has more cameras in Gaza than any other news outlet, has repeatedly broadcast footage of bodies trapped in rubble and of anguished parents clutching children wrapped in shrouds. The network’s anchors and reporters have hewn closely to Hamas’s preferred vocabulary for the conflict, speaking about “resistance fighters” battling against an “occupation army.” One of Al Jazeera’s most prominent journalists, Majed Abdulhadi, celebrated Hamas’s attack as it happened by reciting a kind of prose poem: after rhapsodizing at length about the astonished surprise of an Israeli soldier who was captured in his tank, Abdulhadi concluded that, “in one fell swoop,” the assault had “wiped away dark layers of despair.” The video clip is still circulating on Arab social media, where it has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.
Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, has covered many conflicts between Israel and Hamas, and the group’s leaders have sometimes saluted his coverage for conveying their perspective. In an interview on the network in 2021, Dahdouh, who is Palestinian, said that about twenty members of his family had been killed in clashes with Israel. (At least four relatives belonged to the militant group Islamic Jihad.) Dahdouh continued, “Perhaps this is among the difficult moments in the life of a Palestinian journalist—when he goes to report on an incident and discovers the incident is his brother or cousin.”
On October 25th, Al Jazeera broadcast footage of Dahdouh on a Gaza rooftop, shrieking in agony while receiving a phone call telling him that an air strike on a refugee camp had hit his family. (It killed his wife, a sixteen-year-old son, and a six-year-old daughter.) A video posted on social media captured him moments later, at a hospital, still wearing his blue press flak jacket, as he cried over the shrouded body of his son. “Are you taking revenge through our kids?” he asked, staring into the camera. “They are child killers, no more, no less. . . . The army of occupation must be driven away!” On Friday, Dahdouh was on the air again, telling viewers that he saw “no escape” from his duty to report on Palestinian suffering.
The other pan-Arab networks—Al Arabiya, which is controlled by the rulers of Saudi Arabia, and Sky News Arabia, which is controlled by the rulers of the United Arab Emirates—initially appeared to resist Hamas’s story line. The Saudis and the Emiratis loathe Hamas and its Islamist allies. The U.A.E. formalized diplomatic ties with Israel in 2020; Saudi Arabia has signalled that it expects to do the same. Al Arabiya and Sky News Arabia both started off broadcasting critical reports about what they called the Hamas attack. On October 8th, the Sky News Arabia journalist Nadim Koteich appeared to justify Israeli retaliation by comparing Hamas’s slaughter to Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. The Hamas assault, Koteich said, was “a premeditated coup against the Arab-Israeli peace plan.”
But as the Gaza death toll has climbed, and as Arab opinion has swung toward Hamas, the networks have seemingly capitulated to the feelings of their viewers. Putting aside “the Hamas attack,” newscasters now increasingly refer to the Israeli “war on Gaza.” And the networks have joined Al Jazeera in carrying extensive footage of suffering and carnage in Gaza. “Residents of a neighborhood in Gaza, most of them women and children, lying under the rubble,” an Al Arabiya headline declared, on October 26th. At the same moment, a chyron repeated a report, by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, saying that in the preceding hours another four hundred and eighty-one Palestinians had been killed by Israeli air strikes.
When referring to dead Palestinians, both networks still appear to favor the relatively neutral term “victims.” But at one point Ahmad Harb, an Al Arabiya reporter in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, briefly spoke of eleven casualties as “martyrs”—the term that Palestinian groups invariably use to describe those killed in the conflict. Harb, apparently being interrupted by a producer speaking into his earpiece, quickly corrected himself, reverting to “victims.” On October 24th, the clip of his gaffe went viral on Arab social media, where it was portrayed as a glimpse of the effort by the network’s overseers to check the sympathies of their journalists in the field.
Israel’s military dominance grows more evident by the day; according to officials of the Gaza Health Ministry, Israeli forces have killed more than eight thousand people. Yet Israeli, Palestinian, and Western analysts all told us, emphatically, that in the Middle East the winner of the propaganda war is Hamas.
Ghassan Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit University, in the West Bank, and a former official in the Palestinian Authority, told us that he plans to release poll results showing a jump in support for Hamas among West Bank Palestinians. “Hamas is getting more popular because it is perceived to be standing up to the oppressive Israeli occupation, and because of the brutal retaliation by Israel,” he said. Americans and Israelis, he added, sometimes assume that the current war began on October 7th. But Arabs, and especially Palestinians, had been paying closer attention in the preceding days and decades. Khatib told us that this audience sees the Hamas attack as retribution for decades of “piecemeal repression,” including the expansion of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the increase in settler violence against Palestinians. He noted, “People here accept a message that what Hamas did was a response to something that Israel has been doing every day for years and years.”
As Arab opinion shifts toward Hamas, Arab leaders are growing more reluctant to buck it. A statement from the Arab League on October 11th—which condemns “the killing and targeting of civilians on both sides,” including by Hamas—surprised many in the region. But on October 24th, at a United Nations meeting on the conflict, that evenhandedness evaporated. Arab foreign ministers from across the region took turns fulminating against the human cost of the Israel air strikes; all avoided discussion of the ghastly role Hamas had played in setting off the latest round of conflict.
Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, recently spoke by phone with the President of Venezuela, and an initial readout released by the authority’s news agency describes Abbas as having said that Hamas’s actions and policies “don’t represent the Palestinian people.” Just a few moments later, however, this account of Abbas’s criticism of Hamas disappeared from the news site. Current and former officials of the authority told us that Abbas had demanded a retraction.
Nasser al-Qudwa, a nephew of the late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and a former foreign minister of the Palestinian Authority, has long condemned Hamas. But in a phone interview he told us that he could no longer do so in public. “I’m not willing to criticize them now,” he said. “How could I while bombs fall on people’s heads?”
For Israel, the growing embrace by Palestinians and other Arabs of Hamas’s self-portrayal—of outgunned resistance fighters revolting against an unjust occupation—compounds the difficulty of finding any path forward. Israeli leaders have vowed to “destroy” Hamas, but have declined to elaborate on what that means in practice. And how could Israel’s goal be achieved when the idea of Hamas is gaining more support each day of the war?
Shibley Telhami, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who studies Arab public opinion, said that Israeli and American talk of destroying Hamas was playing into the group’s hands. Telhami told us, “When people in the Arab world hear ‘destroy Hamas,’ they think, ‘destroy Gaza.’ ” Telhami argued that unflinching American support for Israel’s retribution had now firmly tied Washington to the losing side of the propaganda war, adding, “In the Middle East and across the Global South, Joe Biden has become the same as the George W. Bush of the Iraq War. And, right now, there is no way around it.” ♦
