With its announcement that militants guarding Israeli hostages in the buildings and tunnels of Gaza had “new instructions” to kill them If Israeli troops closed in, Hamas signaled the opening of a chilling new chapter in an already brutal war.
Seizing on a spasm of public outrage in Israel at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inability to bring home the remaining hostages, Hamas released a comic-book style image of a kneeling figure threatened with a gun, followed by a video of Eden Yerushalmi, a bartender at the Nova music festival and one of six hostages who Israel says were shot at close range in Hamas captivity last week before Israeli forces could reach them.
In cruel twist of timing – the funerals of the slain hostages had taken place on Sunday and Monday – Hamas said it would drip-feed footage of what it described as the “final messages” of the remaining five.
It released a second video on Tuesday, featuring Ori Danino, a 25-year-old who was abducted from the Nova music festival on October 7. Danino had helped other festival-goers escape the horror.
It was not clear when any of the footage was filmed – not whether it was intended that the videos would be used in the way that Hamas is now doing.
Hamas’ new tactics – which Yerushalmi’s family say amount to “psychological terror” – will further fan the fury in Israeli society.
For the past three days, crowds have swelled in multiple Israeli cities, with protesters blaming Netanyahu for, in their view, sacrificing Israeli citizens to stay in power, as rightwing members of his coalition have threatened to bring down the government should he end the war.
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But it is not yet clear whether they will compel Netanyahu to change Israel’s approach to the war in Gaza.
Some analysts say that unlike earlier in the war, Hamas may no longer believe that keeping hostages gives it leverage over Israel.
“Hamas has taken the hostage issue out of the equation. It knows that this current Israeli administration is not interested in any kind of hostage release deal,” Tahani Mustafa, a senior Palestine analyst at Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, told CNN. “I don’t think they consider them as substantial playing cards any longer.”
In a statement Monday evening, Hamas spokesperson Abu Obaida said the new instructions had come into place after an “incident” in Nuseirat, seeming to refer to an IDF operation in June that rescued four Israeli hostages from a refugee camp in central Gaza.
The raid, which killed 274 Palestinians, occurred mid-morning when the streets were teeming with people shopping at a nearby market. Some of the captors were killed, and the IDF successfully retrieved the hostages unharmed, further weakening Hamas’ leverage in negotiations with Israel.
Since then, the IDF has rescued one more hostage – Farhan Al-Qadi, 52, a Bedouin Israeli citizen who was retrieved from a tunnel in Gaza last week.
When Hamas took some 250 people hostage from southern Israel on October 7, “they thought they could try to leverage them for a prisoner exchange deal,” Mustafa said. Although an exchange deal was struck as early as November, no further agreement has been reached 10 months later.
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