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(LifeSiteNews) — Following a deal brokered by Donald Trump, four Israeli hostages were released on Saturday during a spectacular, unexpected release process orchestrated by Hamas.
Videos show the four young female IDF soldiers in a large crowd of cheering Palestinians, plus numerous masked Hamas militants accompanying them. The young women were constantly smiling, surprisingly relaxed, and then waved to the Palestinian crowd from an outdoor stage erected for the event.
They even thanked their Hamas captors for “keeping them safe” and treating them well.
The entire event has understandably been denounced by the Israeli government and most Western media as a masterful propaganda exercise. The women did not appear to be under any stress. Their appearance and behaviour completely contradicted what Israeli officials have been promoting for months about how brutally Hamas was treating hostages.
Three more women hostages were released a few days prior. They were similarly relaxed and smiling, in stark contrast to the condition of almost all the Palestinian prisoners released from horrific Israeli jails in exchange.
Former U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman stated in a Judging Freedom interview on January 28 that “those who actually were able to see the release of both imprisoned Palestinians and then the released Israelis, will have noticed that the Israeli prisoners, who were actually prisoners of war because they were soldiers, were in excellent condition.”
“And the Palestinians show all the marks of having been tortured, starved, beaten, and the like. So that’s another contrast that the world has seen.”
Freeman emphasized the Israeli hostages are “in very good condition, and Hamas is very much in charge in Gaza.” However, not all released Israeli hostages have been in such good shape. One recent woman hostage was in terrible condition when released.
Freeman indicated that such hostages were not Hamas hostages but were instead held captive by Islamic Jihad: a separate, more fundamentalist Islamist organization.
Islamic Jihad may have been responsible for some of the worst violence against Israeli civilians during the October 7, 2023, invasion. Some non-Hamas militants, not under Hamas authority, were known to have taken advantage of the openings into Israel to attack Israeli civilians.
Freeman also emphasized that “when Netanyahu equates Hamas with the entire Palestinian resistance to ethnic cleansing, genocide, murder, sabotage, and the destruction of physical infrastructure, he is making a mistake.”
“This is the language of propaganda, not of serious statesman-like analysis,” he stated.
Propaganda is as much a fact of war as it is of peace. It is used to sell products, concepts – and even wars. The story of these hostages is a case in point of how atrocities have been manufactured to sell Israel’s war in Gaza to the world.
The wars we have witnessed in our lifetimes have all been sold to us. Focus groups were used to devise the narrative for the Iraq war – with talking points arranged around “weapons of mass destruction.”
Atrocity propaganda was how Israel sold its genocide to the Western public. The truth of the attacks of October 7 was inconvenient – Netanyahu knew they were coming and did nothing to stop them.
READ: Israeli leaders call for October 7 inquiry following claims Benjamin Netanyahu ‘let it happen’
The truth of the attacks themselves was insufficient to justify the genocide that followed. In fact, Israeli media has reported that Israeli military units killed over 200 of their own civilians on the day – under the notorious “Hannibal Directive” – to prevent more hostages from being taken.
Though individual claims of rape and sexual violence are being investigated – the story that mass rapes took place on the orders of Hamas is not supported by the facts.
A report from Israel’s senior prosecutor said this month that Israel still cannot find any evidence to prove any cases of rape on October 7.
“The ordinary laws of evidence are not suitable in this case,” said Moran Gez, the Israeli Southern District Attorney. She is pressing for the death penalty “with no mercy” in every case.
The Israeli response was planned well in advance, just as the Iraq war was planned in advance – by Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies.
Fake reports of burned and beheaded babies were combined with a narrative of rape. One image condensed this horror and transmitted it into the minds of millions.
The message was that the Israelis are dealing with savages here. The problem is the message was not true.
Naama Levy is the Israeli soldier pictured during her arrest on October 7, 2023 – and her release on Saturday, January 25. Her hands bound with cable ties, her feet bleeding, she had been captured where she had been stationed: in an IDF surveillance base at Nahal Oz.
Hamas released a video of her arrest on October 7, 2023. Her bloodied sweatpants were seen as alleged evidence she had been raped. She was not raped.
Pro-Israeli media pressed the feminist movement for support. “Protest performance” events were staged in London and in Brazil.

One Israeli woman displayed herself in bloodied pants in Beverly Hills.
On May 22, 2024, a video was released of her capture, along with that of three other young female soldiers.
The video was released by the Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum, and was compiled from bodycam footage recorded by Hamas fighters.
In July 2024, a relative of one victim spoke out. Udi Goren, wearing the forum’s “Bring them Home Now” t-shirt, said he held one group responsible for his cousin’s death on October 7.
“The Israeli government. Only they and none other have the responsibility to solve this catastrophe for Israel,” Goren claimed, adding, “The same people who were in power on the day of October 7th and failed to protect [us].”
Goren echoed the outrage felt by the Hostage Families Forum, who two months earlier accused Netanyahu of sacrificing their relatives for his own ends. Goren said, “After seven and a half months, we – the hostage families, the internally displaced from northern and southern Israel, the bereaved families and the reserve soldiers – we demand to know: what’s the plan?”
Fast forward to this year, when on January 14, Haaretz revealed that Netanyahu’s own national security minister admitted that “Netanyahu sacrificed the lives of hostages for his political survival.” The report continued:
A deal for releasing the hostages has been on the table for an entire year, and Netanyahu has repeatedly scuttled it to preserve his government, which is dependent upon his criminal alliance with the Kahanist right wing.
Ben-Gvir is a leading member of this “right wing” – his politics inspired by the late Meir Kahane, who was described by the FBI as a violent terrorist.
The words and deeds of Netanyahu’s government appear to have answered Udi Goren’s question:
What’s the end game of this war? How do they intend to get my cousin back when there’s no talk about the day after?
No deal would have brought peace – as Netanyahu’s own minister Hanegbi told the hostage families, saying in May 2024 that “Israel would not end the war in Gaza for a deal to save all the abductees.”
The strategy of destruction, extermination, expulsion, and settlement was not invented on October 8. It is a strategy to which peace is fatal. To carry out this plan, an atrocity was needed to legitimize the massacre. An atrocity on the scale of Pearl Harbor – which is how Netanyahu described it to Americans.
Fake reasons for a real war
The reasons supplied for the war in Gaza are not the real reasons. The real, provable facts of the brutal October 7 spiral of violence were not enough to justify the genocidal Greater Israel expansion-planned response in the minds of the public.
This is the reason atrocities were fabricated, and false narratives presented as fact. It was simply a means of selling this war to the West. It was never about the hostages. It was never about Hamas, a party which has been supported by Netanyahu “for years” to guarantee the public image of Gaza was one of masked terrorism.
The war in Gaza is a war on Gaza. It is part of the career-long strategy of Netanyahu to destroy any hope of a Palestinian state. To achieve this goal, he has dragged the United States into war after war to eliminate any support for the Palestinian cause outside and beside Israel’s borders.
The savagery unleashed in Gaza has killed over 50,000 people. Most of these people were women and children. Reports say more bodies are being pulled from the rubble, and the real death toll may be 40 percent higher or even much more than the official number.
Churches, hospitals, schools, and homes were targeted for complete destruction for false propagandist reasons. Only if the world could be convinced that these people deserved this collective punishment could Israel win the media war.
The New York Times: ‘Weaponized rape’ hoax
Weeks after the October 7 attacks, for which Israeli leadership received detailed advance warnings, including from their own intelligence, the New York Times published a headline report. It was called “Screams without words – How Hamas Weaponized sexual violence” and appeared on December 28, 2023.
To make this case, it told the story of “The Woman in the Black Dress.”
It said this woman – Gal Abdush – had been killed and raped by Hamas. Yet the woman’s family said the New York Times had simply “invented” the claim.
On January 2, 2024, Abdush’s sister denied the rape claims and said the Times had manipulated and misled the family. Two days later, on January 4, Abdush’s brother-in-law said on Israeli television that “the media invented” the story. On the same day, Haaretz reported that Israeli police could not find any victims of the alleged mass rapes.
The Times said the evidence for Abdush’s rape was taken from a “video that went viral.” Yet no such video could be produced by the Times.
The Intercept reported on the scandal, finding that the story had been written by amateurs, including a former Israeli intelligence agent working for the Times. The Intercept concluded there was no evidence for the Times’ headline claim that Hamas had weaponized rape.
The story was spun from word of mouth. The Times had cited testimonies of two Israeli volunteers at the Shura base who handled bodies from October 7 – saying they saw evidence of “sexual violence” and even genital mutilation.
Haaretz reported on April 18, 2024, that no evidence was found to support these claims:
Israel has no proof that the terrorists of Hamas or other organizations received explicit orders to commit acts of rape.
Despite the lurid claims in the New York Times report, “According to a source knowledgeable about the details, there were no signs on any of those bodies attesting to sexual relations having taken place or of mutilation of genitalia.”
The Times has published retractions of some of its most shocking stories – including one made by an “Israeli medic” claiming that two teenage Israeli girls had been raped at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7.
A video taken by an Israeli soldier emerged disproving the baseless claims, and the Times corrected its report in May 2024.
🚨Wow. @nytimes has just debunked its own genocidal atrocity propaganda lie about 2 teenage girls being raped in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct 7. But will it now formally retract @gettleman’s fraudulent Dec 28 “investigation”? https://t.co/rwcSJFU1vc pic.twitter.com/2i0PCrqWyc
— Ali Abunimah (@AliAbunimah) March 25, 2024
Selling war with lies
The Jewish independent journalist Max Blumenthal has published extensive reports on the manufacture of atrocity propaganda – even producing a documentary on Atrocity Inc. – How Israel Sells its War on Gaza.
One GrayZone report showed where the mass rape narrative came from – Cochav Elkayam-Levy, an Israeli lawyer described as an “Israeli propagandist.” After her fake news had captured the Western eye, she was exposed in the Israeli media as “a grifter and a fraud.”
After her fake narrative was adopted by Western media, she was lauded for her lies on CNN and awarded the Israel Prize, the nation’s highest civilian honour – as the GrayZone reports:
Yet three days later, Israel’s largest newspaper, YNet, published a damning exposé accusing Elkayam-Levy of ripping off major donors, including a member of the Biden administration, spreading fake Hamas atrocity tales, and failing to deliver on her promise of a major report about sexual violence on October 7.
A representative of the Israeli government said “people have disassociated themselves with her” for spreading “fake news.”
Elkayam-Levy had also repeated another big lie – as the GrayZone explained:
[Israeli] Government officials were particularly incensed that Elkayam-Levy spread discredited claims that a Hamas militant cut a fetus from a pregnant woman before raping the woman – a lie first spread by confirmed fraudster Yossi Landau of the scandal-stained ZAKA organization.
The Israeli official said Levy had spread a story that she knew did not happen:
“The story about the pregnant woman who had her stomach cut open – a story that was proven to be untrue … she spread it in the international press,” the official complained to YNet. “It’s no joke. Little by little, professionals began to distance themselves from her because she is unreliable.”
Like Yossi Landau, who admitted that he lied about the massacre of babies, Elkayam-Levy appears to have raised millions of dollars by peddling fake atrocities – to justify Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
Landau’s Zaka had raised almost $14 million in donations in just over one year following Landau’s false reports of atrocities. The president of the United States and his chief diplomat, Antony Blinken, repeated his false claims – which were repeated throughout American media.
The image of Naama Levy has been shown again and again to promote a false narrative of mass sexual atrocities as a weapon of war by Hamas. This from a nation whose Parliament ruled that the rape of captives with a metal rod was legitimate treatment of prisoners.
“Anything is legitimate,” said a member of Netanyahu’s party of the rape of prisoners by IDF soldiers.
This is the moral reasoning behind the production of fake horrors – to excuse the commission of mass atrocities in reality. The most effective propaganda directed at the American people and the West in general is not produced by your enemies – but by Israel, our greatest ally.
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