The bodies of the slain hostages abducted during the October 7 Massacre were weaponized by Hamas on Thursday morning, with the alleged remains of Oded Lifshitz and Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas in a ceremony paraded before crowds of masked militiamen and celebrating civilians.
The Gazan terrorist coalition was likely attempting to use the hostage remains as a three-pronged psychological trident to stab at Israelis and Palestinians, and while Hamas and its supporters may believe that they have designed the propaganda spectacle to defuse any blowback, like the 2023 pogrom in which they seized the captives, it will blow up in their faces.
In its Islamist fanaticism and pathological hatred of Israel, anything in Hamas’s power invariably becomes a weapon. Yet, hatred is a flame that burns all, regardless of who kindles it, and the weapons Hamas forges in its fires unfailingly backfire.
Hamas’s Gaza arsenal has long relied on rockets and mortar bombs to strike at Israelis, which are prone to falling within the Gaza Strip. The IDF said in October 2023 that one in five rockets launched from Gaza misfired and fell in the same territory.
Just last Thursday, a 14-year-old Palestinian was killed when a Gazan rocket misfired. It’s hard to know just how many Palestinians Hamas and the like have killed in gun battles and RPGs, as they are not known for being the most discriminate in their fire.
Gaza itself was turned into a gun pointed at Israel, with underground tunnels, rocket launch sites, and military infrastructure integrated into the very soil. Gaza suffered when this infrastructure was upturned.
No stranger to weaponizing bodies
Hamas is no stranger to weaponizing bodies. During the Second Intifada, it popularized the suicide bomb, killing its own operatives for a more certain opportunity of murdering Israelis.
The jihadist group also weaponized its subjects in Gaza, using them as tactical and strategic human shields to deter Israeli attacks.Willingly or not, Gazans died when the Hamas command structures and ammunition stockpiles that they were shielding with their body were destroyed in Israeli airstrikes.
Even their deaths have been weaponized, with Hamas supporters using their bones to club the international community into adopting policies they think will harm their enemies.
It is a strategic blunder, but perhaps not an entirely shocking one, that Hamas thinks that it can weaponize the bodies of Israelis in a similar manner.
Having lost their most iconic figures, thousands of their best fighters, and having shot up, blown up, and sacrificed Palestinians and their homes for 15 months, Hamas needs to raise the morale of its ranks, recruit from the populace, and justify losses to their subjects.
These ceremonies are likely just as much for domestic consumption as they are against Israelis. The parade of coffins is a triumph for the dead commanders, a circus of cadavers to appeal to the most extreme of their base.
Beyond the borders of their self-ruined territory, Hamas hopes to save itself from Israeli wrath by using the hostage remains as a threat to stop the IDF from continuing the war.
A ceremony poster depicting Israeli flag-draped coffins behind a Gazan terrorist literally rooted into the ground read, “The return of the war equals the return of your prisoners in coffins.”
IN THE long-term, the Gazan terrorist groups likely believe that the humiliation, demoralization, and pain caused by flaunting Israeli dead and taunting their family and friends will cause an exodus from Israel.
In its ideological delusion, Hamas and its ilk have convinced themselves that the Levant is Algeria and Israelis are French colonists, and if only they can raise the cost to be greater than the benefit of living in Israel, then the Jews will flee.
They perceptually blinded themselves through fanaticism to refuse to see that Israelis have roots in the land as great as their own, that Israelis have been told from birth that they have no other land, that they don’t all have passports to some far-off nation.
Israelis will not flee the Holy Land because they fear death as Hamas loves to embrace it, but rather in the face of Hamas devaluing life, they will fight because they love life in Israel.
All the macabre Thursday morning display will do is harden the resolve of Israelis, committing them to finally destroy the Hamas death cult.
The hearts of Israel will not be hardened alone. The Jewish Diaspora and international public watched Thursday’s events with disgust.
Hamas and its degenerate Western supporters believe that they can protect themselves from their propaganda weapon misfiring by claiming that an Israeli airstrike killed the Bibas family.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his army killed them with missiles and Zionist warplanes,” proclaimed a ceremony poster with an image of a vampiric Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ready to pounce on the slain hostages.
Until it is proven that an airstrike killed the Bibas family members, it is just as likely, if not more so, in the minds of many that Hamas executed them. Hamas killed the children’s grandparents on October 7, it shot their dog, it has threatened repeatedly to execute hostages throughout the war up to and including Thursday, and Hamas has murdered hostages when the IDF drew too close to rescuing them.
Even for those who believe that an airstrike may have killed the hostages, the ceremony made the depravity of Gaza available for the world to see.
The alleged Israeli airstrike did not force Hamas and Palestinian pogromists to raid Kibbutz Nir Oz, nor did it make them brutally abduct the Bibas family. An alleged Israeli airstrike did not force the captors to hold babies for ransom in a warzone of Hamas’s creation for 500 days, and when the alleged Israeli strike supposedly claimed their lives, it didn’t mean they had to continue to ransom bodies.
It is certain that it was Hamas terrorists, not Israeli airmen, that paraded coffins bearing the hostages' images in front of leering crowds in a grim show.
No way to hide the evils
No rhetorical flourish can hide these evils, and any propaganda successes will result in greater failures around the world.
This ceremony is a mask-off moment, a call for realization much like the October 7 massacre itself. Many will call for Israel to do what is needed to ensure that such crimes do not happen again.
In misunderstanding its enemies, Hamas has led to the activation of an Israeli weapon greater than that of any missile or tank, the resolve of the Israeli people.
Hamas’s newest weapon will not be able to penetrate its target, and result in the same way that it always has for the weaponization of the Palestinian cause – more loss of war, more loss of property, and, unfortunately, the loss of Palestinian lives.