This was an important narrative to Hamas. So important that they gave tranquilizers and extra food to the hostages before they were released to the Red Cross.
So important that they went out of their way to make the freed hostages wave to them and shake hands while the captives were still uncertain if they were really free. .
So important that they forced one of the hostages to write a letter "thanking" them for how well they supposedly treated her daughter.
Yet every day we learn more horrors of how the children - let alone adult males - have been treated in Gaza.
One child said he kept track of time by tearing off pieces of his fingernails and saving the clippings to count the days. Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, the director of Schneider Children’s Medical Center of Israel, said another child asked a flurry of questions: “Are we allowed to look out the window? Are we allowed to open the door? Can we walk outside the room?” Another child said she was confused to see people waiting for her because she was told that no one was looking for her, that no one cared for her, and that there would be no Israel left for her.At times, a social worker or psychologist would step out of the room to cry.“They spoke about death as if they’re going down to the grocery and speaking about which ice cream they will buy,” Dr. Mozer-Glassberg said.
And every day we learn more and more.
Hamas went through a lot of effort to create the fantasy of having treated the hostages well. And this is all solid evidence of the levels of deception that they go through to spread their narrative.
Everything Hamas said about the hostages has been proven a lie. But these are not mere lies - they are carefully pre-planned deceptions on multiple levels.
This isn't a set of off-the-cuff lies. This is a strategy. And this strategy extends way beyond the hostages to every aspect of this war. Because Hamas understands, perhaps better than Israel does, that the cognitive war is at least as important as the kinetic war.
Hamas' attempts to fool the world about how they treated the hostages are now proven. Equally proven are the absurd Hamas' denials of rape or even murdering civilians. Some of their lies are laughably obvious, like when they claim to have destroyed hundreds of IDF armored vehicles or killed thousands of soldiers, or that Israeli airstrikes hit the Al Ahli hospital. Any slightly objective observer can see these for the lies they are.
But they are all part of the same strategy to manipulate world opinion - there are plenty of antisemites who will cling to any crumb of Hamas lies and insist that it is Israel that is lying, and they are faithful soldiers in Hamas' propaganda army. Any time Hamas casts doubt in the general public about the truth, they win, no matter how provably false their claims are. And they are also playing to their base in the Arab world, with Al Jazeera eagerly parroting their lies on cable TV.
If Hamas lied about the hostages, and they did, then we can assume they are lying about everything in the same attempt to manipulate world opinion. Lying is an integral part of Hamas' war strategy.
Of course there have been children and women who have died in Israeli airstrikes. But that truth is part of a much larger web of falsehood claiming a huge percentage of the dead are women and children, that practically no terrorists are dead. In the past Hamas counted people who died of natural causes as being victims of Israeli fire - and hundreds of people die of natural causes in Gaza in any normal month. We've seen plenty of faked Pallywood productions of dramatic footage of injured and dead children, bulking up the real footage.
This is why it is so frustrating when the media or politicians make it sound like Hamas claims have equal or greater weight than what Israelis say. The hostage story shows that everything Hamas says must be assumed to be part of this propaganda strategy, that they are leavening a few drops of truth with a tsunami of falsehoods, and they look very sincere when they try to fool gullible Westerners and rally Arab allies.
Literally every word they say is aimed at manipulating the listener. That is the most important fact that the media is not reporting.
