A photo of my frail grandmother helping her even more gaunt sister choose a dress after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen death camp graces the wall at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
My grandmother recovered physically but was scarred emotionally. Nevertheless, she still managed to move to Israel, run a business, raise a family, and live long enough to see her grandchildren thrive in the Jewish state.
Her sister, however, was not so fortunate, and that photo, which was apparently taken two days before she died of typhus in the camp, is all that is left of her. The only consolation is that the image of the sick and sicker women that paints the picture of the challenges after the camp’s liberation remains seared in the minds of anyone who visits the museum.
Therefore, I was genuinely startled by the top media outlets in the world that did not deem the frail images of the three Israeli hostages released on Saturday worthy of an immediate story. For even the most jaded journalists, how could the emergence from Gaza of the emaciated Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami not move you?
Israeli media and influencers immediately made the connection between Holocaust survivors and the hostages released after 491 days in Hamas captivity. The president of the United States got it, too.
But take a look at the Instagram accounts of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. You will see plenty of pictures of Gaza and, in the latter two, a photo of the irrelevant antisemite who sabotaged the Super Bowl halftime show.
But no Or, Ohad, or Eli.
The unfortunate conclusion is that gaunt Jews do not play into the narrative of the world media, which has bought into Hamas’s deliberate strategy of painting Gazans as victims and Israelis as aggressors.
How Hamas has been staging hostage releases
Under the direction of an Al Jazeera producer in Doha, Hamas has been staging hostage releases to get across its messages on the stages erected for its cynical shows, with full cooperation of the international media.
Hamas wisely released the hostages who were in the best condition first when the world was watching. Now that the releases have become routine, and the top media are no longer paying attention, they are unchaining the skeletal men from the terror dungeons where they have been tortured.
And they knew they could get away with it because the release of elderly American citizen Keith Siegel barely got any coverage in the United States. Eli Sharabi’s horror story of finding out about the murder of his family after saying on stage that he was looking forward to seeing them only made the news in the UK because of his enchanting non-Jewish in-laws, Pete and Gillian Brisley, who live in Wales.
When there was coverage in the mainstream media of the three hostages’ condition, it was immediately balanced out by portraying the Palestinian terrorists Israel released as equally mistreated, in a shameful attempt at moral equivalence.
THE PRO-ISRAEL media watchdog HonestReporting singled out three major media outlets for condemnation: the BBC, CNN, and The Guardian.
The BBC reported that there were “concerns over the appearance of hostages on both sides,” equating the innocent civilians kidnapped and starved by Hamas with Palestinian terrorists who can earn university degrees in Israeli prisons and are visited by the Red Cross, who ignored the hostages until they taxied them to Israel.
For hours, the BBC’s live news homepage featured a celebratory image of Palestinian prisoners embracing their families instead of showing the emaciated hostages, in what was, at the very least, a problematic editorial choice.
CNN balanced its headline, “Israel condemns frail appearance of captives,” with a sub-headline about the Palestinian prisoners, saying that “many of them appeared emaciated and in poor health.”
Never to be outdone, The Guardian announced its agenda with its headline, “Gaunt captives emerge from Gaza and Israel.”
These headlines could be dismissed or even mocked if they were not so immoral and dangerous. Media framing matters. When such comparisons mislead the public and distort reality, people around the world believe Israel is no better than the terrorist organization that attacked our civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.
Emily Hand did not simply go "missing from Be'eri," @BBCNews.She did not walk out of her kibbutz into Gaza. Hamas terrorists abducted her.Why is it so difficult for the BBC to give agency to Palestinian terrorists? pic.twitter.com/a33NGEsC4x
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) February 10, 2025
The Wall Street Journal deserves credit for following up by interviewing neighbors of Sharabi but wrote that he “lost family members during the initial Hamas attack,” as if they merely went missing. The same article said that Levy’s wife “had died,” instead of telling the world that she was murdered in the bomb shelter of death where the late heroes Aner Shapira and Hersh Goldberg-Polin had saved lives.
Hamas has threatened to stop releasing hostages, but it should not surprise anyone if the next ones released are in even worse condition and are ignored even more by mainstream media and the so-called influencers who have become so dangerously powerful.
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Influencers who support Hamas boasted on Instagram and TikTok about how healthy the released female hostages looked.
According to the latest Pew Research study, 20-24% of Americans, including 37% under 30, regularly get their news from influencers on social media, enhancing the impact of biased coverage. In the US presidential race, 24% of all Americans got their election news primarily from social media in 2024.
Major outlets like CNN and NBC are cutting a significant portion of their workforce while shifting their focus to digital media. These shifting news consumption patterns amplify the impact of biased coverage, as readers encounter skewed information on official news outlets’ social media pages.
It is no wonder that young people, who have been statistically proven to be more impressionable than their parents, could think that Israel perpetrated a genocide in Gaza and not believe that more Israelis were murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, than any one day since the Holocaust.
Media misinformation leads to indifference at best and hate at worst, and that is why the lessons of the coverage of Eli Sharabi, Or Levy, and Ohad Ben Ami must be learned immediately.
My grandmother’s picture on the wall at Yad Vashem proves what happens when the world does not take the suffering of the Jewish people seriously enough.
The writer is the executive director of the pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.