Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire's first phase to seize the moral high ground.
The media have similarly given fleeting coverage to Israel's new wave of destruction, this time in the Occupied West Bank.
For Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the importance of the Israeli captives is solely in providing him with a route back to the genocide.
Israel sustained the West's support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.
With Hamas' October 2023 crimes ever-more distant in the rear-view mirror, and Israeli crimes still all too visible in Gaza's complete destruction – amounting to a "plausible" genocide, according to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Israeli leaders have been desperately trying to shift attention to a fresh narrative battleground.
They need a new set of lies to justify resuming the slaughter. And as ever, the western establishment media are actively assisting.
Both Hamas and Israel are playing a predictable propaganda game, using the regular exchanges of Israeli and Palestinian hostages in the ceasefire's first phase to seize the moral high ground.
Israel once again has all the cards, care of rock-solid western support, and yet once again it is failing to win the public relations war.
Which explains why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw another of his temper tantrums at the weekend, this time blaming Hamas for stage-managing the release of Israelis in what he called "demeaning" and "humiliating ceremonies".
Israel and its supporters were particularly incensed, it seems, by one of the captives, released on Saturday, beaming on stage as he warmly kissed two of his captors on the forehead.
On his walk to the handover with Red Cross staff, he put his arm around one of the captors' shoulders in another moment of apparent affection.
Two other Israelis- up for release in the next round – were filmed watching from a car nearby, excited at the prospect of freedom and pleading with Netanyahu not to sabotage their release.
Blow up ceasefire
Predictably, western media, including the BBC, echoed Israel in suggesting these were somehow far more serious violations than Israel killing over 130 Palestinians since 19 January, when the ceasefire began, in hundreds of attacks on Gaza.
Gaza has survived for thousands of years. It cannot be erased by Trump and Israel
The media have similarly given fleeting coverage to Israel's new wave of destruction, this time in the Occupied West Bank. Thousands of homes have been demolished, ethnically cleansing entire communities.
Western outlets have signally failed to note that these war crimes are also gross violations of the ceasefire agreement.
Now Netanyahu has exploited the apparent cosy relations between some of the Israeli captives and Hamas as a pretext to blow up the ceasefire before the second phase can begin next week. That is when Israel is expected to fully withdraw from Gaza and allow its reconstruction.
Buses carrying hundreds of Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday were forced to turn back, returning them to their prisons. Even according to Israel's own assessments, the vast majority of these Palestinians have not been "involved in combat".
Many, including medical personnel, were seized off Gaza's streets following the 7 October Hamas attack. They have been held without charge, tortured and subjected to barbaric conditions that Israeli human rights groups have compared to "hell".
Genocidal slogans
It would be nice to imagine that Israel and its supporters were genuinely concerned that, in parading its captives in public, Hamas had violated their rights to dignity under international humanitarian law. But don't be fooled – or foolish.
Even before Israel reneged on the hostage exchange, it had vowed that Palestinians would be subjected to their own forms of degrading treatment. They would be forced to wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans supporting Israel's genocidal actions against the people of Gaza.
Israel's own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset. If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months
And Israel's supporters appeared none too concerned about the sensitivities of the 600 Palestinian hostages due for release on Saturday whose buses returned them to their torture camps in Israel just as they could scent freedom.
But in any case, Israel's own hostages have been a low priority for Netanyahu from the outset.
If Israel really cared so much about them, it would not have carpet-bombed Gaza for 15 months.
Instead it would have grabbed the chance for a ceasefire and prisoner swap not last month – as it was forced to do under heavy pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump – but last May, when it was offered a deal on exactly the same terms.
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have used US-supplied, 2,000lb bunker-buster bombs that not only destroyed huge swaths of Gaza indiscriminately but flooded the tunnels where many of the Israelis were being held with toxic gases.
If Israel cared so much for the captives, it would not have set up undeclared "kill zones" across Gaza, where Israeli soldiers shot anyone and anything that moved.
Three shirtless Israelis waving white flags of surrender were gunned down by Israeli troops in precisely such circumstances in December 2023.
Doing as it pleases
The Israeli captives are useful to Netanyahu and his slimy apologists only in so far as they help prop up a narrative that justifies genocide.
Cornered by Trump, the Israeli prime minister had calculated that securing the return of at least some of them was the price he had to pay – to placate the new US president and much of his own public – before he could resume the mass murder of Gaza's children.
War on Gaza: We were lied into genocide. Al Jazeera has shown us how
He has repeatedly made clear that he has no intention of moving towards a permanent ceasefire after phase one, the main prisoner exchanges.
For Netanyahu, the importance of the Israeli captives is solely in providing him with a route back to the genocide.
Hamas, on the other hand, has every incentive to use the small window provided by the release of the captives to suggest it is not the bogeyman of Israeli-engineered and western-enforced dogma.
It hopes its carefully managed releases show how much it is still in charge of Gaza, despite Israel's destructive rampage.
And Hamas has reason to cultivate reasonable relations with the Israeli captives – not least to soften its image with foreign publics, and make it harder for Netanyahu to return to the genocide.
Israel, of course, has no such reciprocal incentive. As the far stronger party - one that, even before 7 October 2023, had been holding the entire population of Gaza hostage through a 17-year siege of the enclave – it can do as it pleases, secure in the knowledge that its claims will never be subjected to proper scrutiny by the western media.
Freed Palestinian prisoners testifying to their torture, sexual assault and rape – confirmed by international human rights monitors – have been simply ignored.
'Stockholm syndrome'
Despite the odds being stacked in Israel's favour, the differential realities are so stark that Israel is losing the propaganda war nonetheless. Which is why Netanyahu has no interest in continuing the prisoner exchanges a day longer than he is required to.
The problem is that the captives released by Hamas are mostly not helping his cause. They are hindering it.
In reducing Hamas simply to monsters, Israel's goal was to dehumanise the entire population of Gaza – to justify its genocidal crimes
There was brief relief from Israel's genocide apologists – noisily echoed by the western media – that one group of Israeli hostages released earlier this month looked nearly as pale and emaciated as the hundreds of Palestinian hostages released by Israel.
There was wall-to-wall outrage at the condition of this small group of Israelis, when there has been utter indifference to the even more wretched condition of freed Palestinians.
But in most cases, the released Israelis have looked reasonably healthy, especially given that Israel has been denying the entry of food and water into Gaza for 15 months and that most of the captives have had to be held deep underground to keep them safe from the Israeli bombing campaigns that have levelled almost all of Gaza.
Of even more concern to Israel, however, the captives have emerged mostly looking relaxed around their captors.
On the defensive, Israel's supporters have dismissed these scenes as staged for the cameras or argued that the captives are suffering from severe "Stockholm syndrome" – a psychological condition in which hostages are said to identify with their captors.
Possible though this may be, it is difficult not to ponder why we have seen no Palestinian captives looking or sounding similarly affectionate towards their Israeli prison guards.
'Little time left'
However western publics weigh the evidence before their eyes, it offers little in the way of succour for Israel.
These scenes between Hamas and the captives are hard to square with the still-dominant, and evidence-free, narrative presented by Israel – and recycled by western establishments – that Hamas are barbarians who behead babies and conduct mass rape.
In reducing Hamas simply to monsters, Israel's goal was to dehumanise the entire population of Gaza – to justify its genocidal crimes.
And yet the scenes of the captives demonstrating a human connection to their Hamas captors make that idea harder to sustain.
What are we to make of Israel's claim to the moral high ground when its leaders have explicitly declared their genocidal intent towards Gaza's children
If Hamas might not be quite as evil as western publics have been led to believe – if its members' behaviour might be no worse than, or even better than, that of Israel's soldiers and prison guards – what does that say about the reliability of western media coverage of the preceding 15 months of genocide?
And even more to the point, what does it say of our own western barbarism that our elected leaders have so casually accepted the murder of many tens of thousands – and possibly hundreds of thousands – of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in supposed revenge for Hamas' 2023 attack?
What are we to make of Israel's claim to the moral high ground when its leaders have explicitly declared their genocidal intent towards Gaza's children – telling us the entire population is implicated in Hamas' attack and are therefore legitimate targets?
What moral high ground can Israel occupy when, even during a supposed ceasefire, it has violated the terms of the agreement more than 250 times and refused to actually cease fire?
What moral high ground is Israel occupying when it drops notices over Gaza, as it did last week, restating its genocidal intent if Palestinians there fail to submit to Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse the entire population?
The leaflet, issued by the "Israeli Security Agency", warns: "If all the people of Gaza cease to exist… No one will feel for you, and no one will ask about you… There is little time left – the game is almost over."
It ends by urging Palestinians to collaborate: "Whoever wishes to save themselves before it is too late, we are here, remaining until the end of time."
Racist calculus
Similarly, Israel has been seeking to exploit high emotions over the deaths in Gaza of the Bibas family – an Israeli mother and her two small children taken hostage on 7 October – by engaging in wholesale disinformation.
After their bodies were returned at the weekend, Israel immediately claimed that they had been killed by their captors – in their case, not by Hamas but a criminal gang, known as Lords of the Desert, that seized the family after also managing to break out of Gaza in October 2023.
Let us assume for a moment that Israel's story of the family's murder "in cold blood" is factually correct.
Whereas it might be understandable - if monstrous nationalism – for Israelis to care more about those three deaths than the slaughter and maiming by the Israeli military of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, why are western politicians and media adopting the same racist calculus?
Why are the deaths of three Israeli innocents so much more significant, so much more newsworthy, so much more painful than the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian innocents?
Why are the deaths of three Israeli innocents so much more significant, so much more newsworthy, so much more painful than the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian innocents?
But in fact, there are very good reasons to believe that Israel is lying once again, and that this is just a reheating of its "beheaded babies" fiction that originally whipped up the mood for genocide.
The Bibas family were widely reported killed by Israeli carpet bombing in November 2023, early on in Israel's genocide.
Hamas offered to return their bodies - along with the still-alive father - shortly after their deaths. Entirely cynically, as pointed out by Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, Israel rejected the offer so it could "deliberately pretend they were still alive and capitalize on the narrative of Palestinian ‘monsters' holding a baby hostage".
Now the Bibas family's suffering is being exploited by Israel and its supporters – aided by the media – to whip up support for a return to murdering Palestinian babies in cold blood.
The likelihood is that the Bibas family, like many thousands of Palestinian families, were torn apart by US-supplied bombs. That might explain the initial mix-up of body parts that led to a Palestinian woman rather than Shiri Bibas, the mother, being returned to Israel before Hamas was able to correct the mistake.
In a sign of how little credibility Israeli officials have on this matter, the surviving members of the Bibas family barred government ministers from attending the funerals due on Tuesday.
Avalanche of complaints
The western media's complicity in these all-too-obvious manipulations has been fully on show once again.
An investigation by Declassified UK last week found staff from the BBC, Sky News, ITN, the Guardian and Times all testifying that Israeli propaganda "reigned supreme" at their outlets.
By pulling Gaza film, BBC shows it cannot stand up to Israel
Disgruntled staff at the Guardian had compiled a spreadsheet with a "mountain of examples" of the paper "amplifying unchallenged Israeli propaganda… or treating clearly false statements by Israeli spokespeople as credible".
A Sky journalist said the channel had imposed a whole set of unwritten rules that applied exclusively to coverage of Israel: "It's a continuous battle to report the truth." Any time Palestinians were humanised, or Israeli spokespeople scrutinised, the channel would face an "avalanche of phone calls and complaints".
Threats to withdraw Sky's access to senior Israeli officials or to bar the channel's correspondents from the region had the desired effect, impacting "what was and wasn't said on air".
BBC staff once again spoke of a culture at the state broadcaster in which Palestinians were routinely dehumanised, in stark contrast to the treatment of Israelis.
One of its journalists noted that "the use of the word genocide is effectively banned, and any contributor who uses this word is immediately shut down".
Which is the context for understanding the BBC's decision at the weekend to remove a documentary on Gaza briefly available on its streaming service iplayer.
Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, a largely child's eye view of the destruction of Gaza, was the first effort by the state broadcaster to properly humanise Palestinians – a full 16 months after Israel began its "plausible" genocide.
Cowardly media
Pro-Israel groups, which have ghoulishly rationalised the slaughter of Gaza's children every step of the way, were inevitably going to throw a hissy fit. And the BBC, equally predictably, was bound to cave at the slightest pressure.
But even by the dismal standards of establishment media cowardice, this was a low.
Pro-Israel lobbyists accused the BBC of supporting terrorism and peddling disinformation because the film's main narrator, 14-year-old Abdullah, is the son of a Hamas government deputy minister.
Ayman al-Yazouri is termed a "terrorist leader" in an official complaint to the BBC penned by 45 Jewish journalists and media executives.
The lobby's objections, however, are the real disinformation - depending for the central premise of Israeli-inspired, draconian UK legislation that conflates any relationship to Hamas, Gaza's government, with terrorism.
Israel has taken hundreds of medical personnel in Gaza captive, and then tortured them, on precisely the grounds that they are associated with terrorism because they work inside public hospitals overseen by the Hamas administration.
Similarly, al-Yazouri, who studied his PhD in environmental chemistry at a UK university and then worked at the United Arab Emirates' education ministry helping to devise its science curriculum, was recruited on his return to Gaza to the education and agriculture ministries. That was for his specialist skills, not because he is a member of Hamas.
His son Abdullah, who was educated at the one English-speaking school in Gaza, was presumably selected for no more sinister reason than that he was one of the few children in Gaza who could fluently narrate to BBC audiences in their native tongue.
In any case, Abdullah's narration is entirely unremarkable: it simply introduces the characters as they struggle through a humanitarian catastrophe engineered by Israel that the audience can see for themselves on the screen.
Extraordinary pressures
The children whose stories are told - and have now been deleted - were selected for clearly journalistic reasons: because they are doing compelling things under extraordinary pressures, from becoming a superstar chef on Tiktok, despite an Israeli-imposed food blockade, to volunteering at a hospital to ferry those maimed in Israeli attacks from ambulances to waiting doctors.
The documentary poses a danger for Israel not because of its politics but because of its humanising of Gaza's children, who have been slaughtered in such enormous numbers
Otherwise, the documentary's framing is entirely Israel-friendly: Hamas is cursed by a suffering population more than Israel; what the world's highest court suspects is a genocide in Gaza is described simply as a "war"; and the Israelis taken captive by Hamas, even soldiers, are uniformly referred to as "hostages".
The documentary poses a danger for Israel not because of its politics but because of its humanising of Gaza's children, who have been slaughtered in such enormous numbers.
What pro-Israel lobby groups fear - apart from a final segment in which an ambulance crew is attacked by Israeli Apache helicopters – is any portrait of Palestinians that contradicts Israeli propaganda: that every person in Gaza, even the children, are terrorists who have brought death and destruction down on their own heads.
That is an argument that should resonate only with psychopaths. And yet our broadcasters accept it unquestioningly, as does the government of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
And it is an argument justifying genocide. That is something western leaders and media ought to be working strenuously to avert. Instead they are helping craft a propaganda narrative that makes the resumption of genocide all but inevitable.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Big News Network or the original publisher Middle East Eye.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net.
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