As three Israeli captives were released from Hamas captivity in Gaza on Sunday, Israel watched every moment in tense anticipation.
Crowds gathered in Tel Aviv to share the sight of Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher being freed after 471 days of captivity in exchange for a ceasefire and 90 Palestinian women and children released from Israeli prison.
The public’s first glimpse of the three women was as they were transferred to the Red Cross in Gaza City. Surrounding the vehicles were several armed Hamas fighters, wearing pristine uniforms and managing a large crowd of inquisitive Palestinians.
The scene, accompanied by footage of Hamas fighters parading in the streets across Gaza atop spotless white trucks, shocked the Israeli public, sowing anger as well as doubt over the 15-month war’s effectiveness.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after all, had promised to eradicate Hamas from Gaza.
“The face of total victory,” wrote Amichai Eliyahu, a former minister from the far-right Jewish Power party, alongside a video he posted on X of celebrating Hamas fighters.
Israel Frey, an independent Israeli journalist, told Middle East Eye that “there is shock among the Israeli public”, following the images of Hamas in Gaza City.
“After a year and four months, in which the public’s eyes have been flooded with information and baseless narratives of stories of total victory and revenge, the Israeli public sees from Gaza images of Toyotas, armed Hamas members and Gaza rising from the ruins,” he said.
Frey said the Israeli perspective of Palestinians, “from Palestinian politicians to young children in Gaza” is through “delegitimisation and dehumanisation”.
This is shared by the “entire society”, he said, from far-right settler youth to urbane liberals.
“Everything is mobilised to narrow the perspective of Israelis and the world in order to see the Palestinians only as Isis, as Nazis and sub-human,” Frey added.
Amal Oraby, a lawyer and Palestinian human rights activist, said the images of Hamas fighters surrounded by civilians were used to reinforce this narrative about Palestinians.
“The Israeli media took this opportunity to repeat the message that there are no innocents in Gaza. They saw it as another opportunity to incite wildly against the Gazan public,” he told MEE.
“In the eyes of the Israeli public and the media, the citizens of Gaza do not deserve to be happy, they do not deserve a moment of normality after 14 months of war.”
Poisonous rhetoric
Channel 12 correspondent Almog Boker, who said several times during the war that “there are no innocents in Gaza”, posted a video showing Hamas members driving white pickup trucks shortly before the ceasefire was set to begin. “If you are looking for a target for an attack…” he wrote suggestively.
The ceasefire was delayed by three hours, during which Israeli attacks killed 19 Palestinians across Gaza, including children. “Done,” Boker crowed afterwards.
Israelis also reacted angrily to the sight of Palestinian civilians celebrating alongside Hamas.
“It was important for the Israeli media to portray the Gazans as guilty of their bad fate in order to deflect blame for the situation in Gaza from Israel,” Oraby told MEE.
According to reports, the deal struck on Wednesday had been on the table since May. Oraby said this will also provoke unease among the public.
“The Israeli media will ask what all this was worth, but this discourse didn’t exist” before the ceasefire, he said.
Israeli liberals and the left never made the argument that the best way to free the captives was through a political agreement and not military force, he noted.
“This camp has once again been silent and has allowed the right to control the narrative that Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza are the only culprits in the situation and that Israel’s war is just,” Oraby said.
The scenes of Palestinian civilians present at the captives’ handover, during which some cried “God is great”, were condemned by Chaim Levinson, a correspondent for the left-wing newspaper Haaretz.
“I am not happy with their joy, but sad for them, that this is who they are, the juice of the garbage of the bottom of humanity,” he posted.
Frey saw these remarks as “taken and inspired by regimes in the not-too-distant history, when the Jewish people were led to the crematoriums under similar slogans”.
According to Frey, this statement is not only symbolically wrong but also endangers life, “because it allows the climate in which the common soldier can choose whether he shoots or not, and that allows the pilot, who can read Haaretz and see himself as a liberal, to bomb Gaza”.
“Instead of bringing the story of Gaza, where people are happy that children can sleep without fear that a bomb will fall on them or that their families will die, there is a campaign to dehumanise the Palestinians,” Frey said.
