In the Civil Commission Report on October 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy introduced the term kinocide into the lexicon.
In my previous blog post “Kinocide – The Annihilation of Familial Bonds, The Impending Destruction of Humanity,” I explained that kinocide – a portmanteau of the prefix “kin-” (family or relative) with the suffix “-cide” (targeted destruction or killing) – is a new term designed to capture a systematic and widespread attack directed against families, the exploitation of familial bonds to intensify suffering, and the targeted destruction of the family unit. Kinocide strikes at humanity by attacking the most fundamental human bond: the family.
The Jewish people were the first to reject human sacrifice, especially sacrifices involving the killing of women and children. At the heart of Jewish culture, we celebrate life, and religion is strongly connected to the family. Family lies at the center of Jewish identity. It is no coincidence that the Jewish toast is L’chaim – to life.
Mounting evidence indicates that the Hamas terrorists acted and operated with premeditated intent on October 7: Their goal was not only to kill Jews, but specifically to destroy Israeli Jewish families. They targeted women with unspeakable violence, attacking the very heart of family life – the life-bearers.
And yet, few analyses have asked the deeper psychological question: Why were women specifically targeted? What unspoken message lies behind the wholesale slaughter and the rage against the family?
After all, Hamas could have executed families and walked away. But they didn’t. They lingered. They engaged in frenzied massacres, brutal torture, and mutilation. They documented their crimes – and were using their victims’ cell phones to share them.
Hamas terrorists target victims' family as part of kinocide
AS PART of the kinocide strategy, they even targeted the victims’ families, sending them horrific trophy images using the victim’s private social media account.
Some of these examples are deeply horrifying. In the case of Ayelet Svatitzk, terrorists used the victim’s WhatsApp account to send her a picture of her elderly mother, Channah Peri, 79, in her living room, under armed guard of terrorists before being kidnapped, and they killed one of her siblings.
In the case of Bracha Levinson, also 79, the terrorists used the victim’s own Facebook account to post a video with her murder.
Regarding the Idan family, terrorists murdered the daughter Maayan, 18, kidnapped her father Tsachi, 49, (murdered in captivity and his body returned after 510 days), then reached out to other family members, using the wife’s personal cellphone and Facebook account to broadcast the atrocities in the apartment live for nearly 30 minutes.
This cruelty of targeting and traumatizing the family was not incidental. It revealed a rage that exceeded even the desire to kill. How can such behavior be understood?
FIRST, WE must delve into Hamas’s inner fantasy life. The image of an iceberg, the vast majority of which is underwater, is useful to conceptualize both conscious and unconscious thinking and behavior. The exposed summit of the iceberg represents 10% of conscious thinking, including premeditation, while the submerged part represents 90% of unconscious thinking, including fantasy. The term kinocide invites us to look beneath the surface and explore the submerged 90%.
Second, we must recognize that 94% of communication is non-verbal and demonstrated through action, making all behavior potentially meaningful. Terrorists may lack the capacity for introspection but their actions during the October 7 horrific attack tell a story. The attack was premeditated, as Dr. Elkayam-Levy emphasized during her Tel Aviv talk for Speak Easy on May 8, yet 90% of the planning was informed by unconscious, violently shared fantasies.
Acknowledging this madness would be too threatening, so the terrorists enact their inner world externally and project it outward. Their violence is rooted in a paranoid and psychotic worldview.
Third, the brutality inflicted on women and children stems from splitting and the projection of inner chaos. Terrorist actions derive from black and white thinking, love or hate, us or them.
This binary allows them to purge their own toxicity by annihilating the other. The maternal WiFi – a powerful unconscious communication – drives them to fuse with, and then destroy, their victims. Their ideology veils a deeper reality: unresolved familial trauma.
This perspective is supported by important works, such as Finnish psychiatrist Matti Tuovinen’s doctoral dissertation on Crime as an Attempt at Intra-Psychic Adaptation, that explores how crime can be an unconscious attempt to resolve internal conflict, and of Abby Stein’s book Prologue to Violence: Child Abuse, Dissociation, and Crime, which shows how crime re-enacts early abuse.
What drives Hamas's violent fantasies?
So, what drives these violent fantasies? Why are women the primary targets?
HAMAS’S TERRORIST psychological mechanism of splitting and projection enables them to project onto Jews what they unconsciously hate about themselves. Hamas terrorists likely failed to develop empathy due to their inability to psychologically separate from their mothers. Their rage against Jewish women is a displacement of rage against their own mothers and families.
Hamas fighters grew up in shame-honor cultures that demanded enmeshment with the mother. In these cultures, the bond between mother and child is viewed as inseparable. The terrorist’s bond with his mother becomes a prison – one that he never managed to escape. The result is a pathological unconscious fusion that stifles individuality and autonomy, yielding sexual frustration, as Mosab Hassan Yousef, author of The Green Prince and Son of Hamas has emphasized: the greatest enemy is shame. In their culture, “to cleanse honor” they must willfully spill blood.
It is no wonder then that the Jewish family becomes the ultimate target, because it embodies safety, continuity, identity, and autonomy. It is everything they long for but cannot have nor bear. It reminds them of everything they lacked and thus becomes intolerable to Hamas.
The hallmark of envy is attacking. In these attacks, Hamas fuses violently with its victims, expressing an unconscious fantasy of killing the mother. This is the psychological heart of the attack.
YAHYA SINWAR, the mastermind of the attack, studied Jewish culture while in Israeli prison. He knew the Jewish emphasis on life, family, and the rejection of child sacrifice. The Jewish family became a symbol of everything he didn’t have, and never would. It is the emotional fabric – the “super glue” – that binds Jewish peoplehood together, and that becomes the ultimate target for destruction. And it all starts with killing the mother. Sinwar’s plan was an attempt to adapt to his own internal fantasy life, shaped by a broken familial past.
Another poignant example, noted by Elkayam-Levy, is the painful separation of two Israeli brothers held hostage. When one was released, their mother’s heartbreak symbolized the emotional fabric Hamas seeks to destroy. It reflected the twinning of brothers – the shared soul – that is sacred in Jewish families.
Hamas’s hatred for such bonds mirrors their own internal disintegration. This vignette speaks volumes about what the October 7 perpetrators were trying to work through by inflicting such brutality upon the Jews, because they sense that they have been used and abused by their own mothers, families, and society.
Final words: In Judaism, Jewish identity is determined by the mother. A Jewish mother is the guarantor of the Jewish people’s continuity, and the mother embodies the link between generations, carrying the identity and future of the Jewish nation.
The jihadi fantasy is one of regression – to return to the womb where all needs will be taken care of, to fuse with the victim, kill the mother, and fulfill the fantasy of destroying any Jewish continuation and family growth. Because that fantasy is unreachable, it is enacted violently – through rape, murder, and annihilation of women.
This is why they target the family. This is why they slaughter the mothers. Kinocide is not only an important legal term; it is a psychological mirror that helps us to stay on guard and warns us to defend what they most seek to destroy: the sanctity of life and the familial bond that is the soul of Jewish peoplehood. After all, we are one big family.
The writer, who holds a PhD, is a psychoanalyst and counterterrorism expert. Follow her at nancykobrin.org