Showing the unshowable: Israel is increasingly showing abroad a crude film about the massacre of hundreds of its citizens by Hamas commandos from Gaza on October 7th.
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After the UN appearances in New York and Geneva, Washington, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid and even Santiago de Chile, around fifty journalists were shown 44 minutes of horror on Tuesday in Paris.
“We have carried out this screening in around thirty countries. “We think it is important for people to know what happened on October 7,” Hen Feder, spokesman for the Israeli embassy in France, told AFP.
While the reality of the massacre committed in Israel is sometimes questioned, especially in the Arab world, “through the media we are trying to convey the message” that unfortunately it was very real, he continues. The film is not available to the general public.
In Paris, one of the guests left the room sobbing before the end of the performance. The others watched the unbearable film in complete silence.
On the screen, bloody, charred, tortured corpses. Of men, women and children. Bodies that no longer look like them. Lies in the thicket, in the living room, in the bathroom… A several meter long trail of blood on light tiles.
According to Israeli authorities, more than 1,400 people, including more than 1,100 civilians, have been killed on the Israeli side since October 7, mostly civilians massacred by Hamas that day, and at least 240 people have been taken hostage.
Nights full of nightmares
Israel claims to have collected hundreds of hours of footage of these attacks. According to Israeli diplomacy, the film was recorded from the body cameras and cell phones of some of the hundreds of killed or captured Palestinian fighters from the Islamist movement Hamas, from Hamas social networks, and from the phones of victims and rescuers.
The images also show gunmen killing civilians, particularly on the Beeri Kibbutz, where 85 people were killed, 26 taken hostage and four disappeared, or mowing down young people fleeing a music festival where more than 270 people died found death.
“The most difficult thing is the outbreak of terrible violence in people’s homes,” emphasizes an AFP journalist who saw the film in Israel and says he is haunted by the scene in which a father dies in front of his two little boys, 10 or 12, killed at most years old. Security cameras in his home will capture one of the brothers screaming, “Why am I still alive?”
“We will continue to portray the atrocities committed by Hamas to “show and remind the world that we are dealing with a terrorist organization whose goal is the destruction of Israel,” the Israeli representative said in a statement on Friday UN, Gilad Erdan, denounces the “joy in killing” of the Hamas commandos seen in the videos, laughing and chanting “Allah Akhbar” (God is the greatest, in Arabic).
“Israel will not stop and there will be no ceasefire until we achieve the goals we set for ourselves: destroying Hamas and bringing our hostages home,” he said. He insisted after a demonstration Friday to dozens of foreign diplomats in New York.
“Battle of the Images”
“We will never stop reminding the world of Hamas’s unimaginable cruelty, especially now that the operation in Gaza is intensifying,” the interim consul general in New York, Aviv Ezra, said in the same statement.
“It is important that the world understands why it is so important that the operation continues until the Hamas threat is eliminated and the hostages are returned,” he added.
In Paris, spokesman Hen Feder rejected any connection between the criticism targeting Israel and the screening of the film.
This communication strategy is particularly controversial, experts say, while Israel’s image abroad has suffered since October 7 from the incessant bombing of the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas since 2007, where additional bombings have occurred, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health, numbering more than 10,000 People died, mostly civilians, including more than 4,000 children.
Showing these images amounts to a “last resort” for Israel, which is currently “losing in the field of communication,” notes Jérôme Bourdon, a sociologist and professor at Tel Aviv University.
Arnaud Mercier, a communications professor in Paris, sees this as a “desperate attempt” and a “hasty escape” by Israel, which, in his opinion, is futile in the “battle of images” against Hamas.
“It is not because we show the grossness of the horrors on the Israeli side that the grossness of the horrors committed in Gaza is erased,” he says.