By Jacki Karsh, JNS
Like the German Nazis before them, Hamas uses video documentation to exert their power and spread their propaganda.
The bodies of Israeli hostages Shiri Bibas, her young sons Kfir and Ariel, and octogenarian Oded Lifshitz were displayed last week by Hamas terrorists on a newly erected “stage” in the Gaza Strip, paraded around like trophies before a crowd of Palestinian Arabs, and handed over to the International Red Cross while music blared from loudspeakers.
We have come to expect awful scenes like these by Hamas.
Jewish hostages (living or now dead) have been marched through the streets of Gaza and handed over to the Red Cross. Some hostages were forced to push through throngs of jeering Gazan mobs. Others were coerced to thank—or even kiss the heads of—their captors on stage. Even the dead were used as props in this latest production. These were scenes of calculated humiliation that have taken place every week since the prisoner exchanges began.
Perhaps your eyes were fixated on the hollow stares and faltering steps of the hostages. Or maybe you were watching terrorists in their pressed military uniforms, brandishing weapons like actors in a “Rambo” movie.
My focus? The Hamas cameramen.
For years, we have seen their handiwork. Hamas’s videography consisted of propaganda films with slickly produced montages of rocket launches and ambushes of Israel Defense Forces soldiers.
But we had never seen the videographers themselves. And yet, there they were, clad in balaclavas and equipped with multiple thousands of dollars worth of equipment front and center in broad daylight at every hostage release “ceremony.” They moved through the hostage procession, mostly in pairs, capturing every minute of this live event with the ease and manner of professionals on a reality television set. They weren’t concealed even slightly. Nor were they in the background. They were center stage, just like the terrorists themselves.
Hamas doesn’t need to place these videographers out in the open. They could have filmed the hostages from a distance, using long-range lenses or high-resolution fixed security cameras. But Hamas deliberately chose not to. They wanted us to see their cameramen. They wanted the world to witness the spectacle—not just of the suffering of the hostages but of the production of their release.
I’ve worked in television news for more than a decade, and these cameramen moved with the same unnerving precision as countless videographers I’ve worked with. These are skilled professionals wielding high-end 4K cameras mounted on gimbals. They stabilized their cameras and glided their arms to dramatically capture movement, different angles and complex shots amidst a crowd. Their final videos—edited with visual effects, rotating Al-Qassam graphic bugs in the corner, and overlaid with music and temporal dilation slowing video for intensity—are true productions. Barbaric content creators.
We saw more of this handiwork with the release of a video Palestinian Islamic Jihad produced of hostage Alexander (“Sasha”) Troufanov before his release. He was forced to participate in a video featuring him on the Gaza beach, running among the rocks and fishing. As if his almost 500-day captivity was a walk on the beach. They produced another video, too, of the moment they informed him of his release, and the setting was real: inside a locked room in a tunnel deep under Gaza.
If this feels disturbingly familiar, it’s because we have seen it before. The Nazis, too, wielded the power of the camera. They filmed Jews in concentration camps, documenting their suffering as a tool of control. They staged propaganda films portraying ghettos as model communities while simultaneously using cameras to capture mass executions, as though genocide needs an audience.
At Auschwitz, Treblinka and in killing fields all over Eastern Europe, SS officers carried cameras. Death was a spectacle to be immortalized in film. Murder was filmed, categorized and stored as if it were something to be proud of. Like Hamas, German Nazis turned terror into content. The videographers were adept in cinematography and photography, possessing a nuanced understanding of how to manipulate visual narratives to align with the ideological imperatives of the Third Reich. They employed the latest technological innovations of the era. They wielded mobile film units and leveraged sophisticated editing techniques to create their videos.
There is something uniquely horrifying about a murderer who wants to film his torture. A terrorist who straps a GoPro to his chest before burning a family alive is not just a killer but a sadist performer.
Why would perpetrators of terror insist on documenting their evil?
Perhaps because the camera is one of the most powerful weapons. To film a victim is to assert power over them. You capture not just a victim’s suffering but his or her submission as well. The Nazis knew this when they forced Jews to smile in staged videos before sending them to the gas chambers. Hamas knows it when they film hostage videos or parade Jews through the streets. The Nazis filmed Jews because they thought they would rewrite the history of what they were doing. In the same vein, Hamas films—these days in high definition—because it believes the world will (and unfortunately, at times does) believe its propaganda.
The reality is history has a way of turning the camera back on those who wield it as a weapon. Nazi footage became evidence that condemned them at Nuremberg. Their propaganda served as proof of their crimes. Hamas may believe it's controlling the narrative but watching those videographers—smoothly panning across scenes of abject horror, framing each shot with a filmmaker’s keen eye—evokes visceral disgust.
And make no mistake, we will not be kind to those who again exploit Jewish tragedy for propaganda. The lens of history is unyielding.
