The images from the October 7 massacre in southern Israel are extraordinarily difficult to behold. Charred bodies, babies riddled with bullet holes, elderly women shot in the head. The depths of Hamas’s depravity are impossible to comprehend.
And yet, after reporters who visited one of the kibbutzim targeted by the genocidal terrorist group last weekend reported that dozens of children had been brutally murdered, the response from some wasn’t horror and revulsion, but rather mockery and incredulity.
This was particularly apparent on X (formerly known as Twitter), a cesspool inhabited by some of the absolute worst of humanity, where some users poked fun at the reporters and openly questioned the veracity of their reports.
In response, Israel violated a longstanding practice.
For years, successive Israeli governments have resisted displaying the mangled bodies, the severed limbs, or the pools of blood produced by Palestinian acts of terror. They did so out of a belief in the Jewish principle of kavod hamet – the dignity of the dead – as well as a refusal to stoop to the level of anti-Israel propagandists, who perversely parade the bodies of dead Palestinians in an effort to garner international support.
This time, however, Israel felt that it had no choice. On Thursday, the government sent media outlets three photos: two of small burnt and blackened bodies, and a third of a small body covered in blood.
We at The Jerusalem Post were among the first to confirm, on the basis of the photos, that the reports of Israeli children murdered by Hamas in unspeakable ways were true. We opted not to display the photos on our website, instead linking to government social media accounts on which the photos could be found, while warning readers that the photos were graphic and deeply disturbing.
Of course, this did not suffice for the propagandists, who suggested that the photos showed that children had been burned to death, but not beheaded, and questioned whether the photos were indeed from southern Israel. Some went so far as to suggest that the photos were fake, generated by artificial intelligence.
The entire discourse is nothing short of nauseating. But it is also telling.
Jews have become accustomed to efforts to deny atrocities of which they are victims. This is perhaps most evident in the obscene phenomenon of Holocaust denial, which is still prevalent throughout the Arab world and elsewhere.
The goal is twofold: to deny Jews sympathy and compassion and to cause them additional pain and suffering by forcing them to prove that the horrors they endured actually happened.
What we have witnessed in recent days is strikingly similar.
Those who deny that Jewish children were murdered by Hamas in ghastly ways do so for the same reasons Holocaust deniers deny the Holocaust: to deny Israel international sympathy and support and to compound Israeli families’ agony by casting doubt on their unthinkable loss.
The release of the photos was necessary to allay any lingering doubts held by reasonable people – though why anyone would doubt that Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization hell-bent on destroying Israel and murdering Jews, is capable of such horrors is beyond us – but, predictably, it did nothing to silence those who questioned the veracity of the reports out of hatred and spite.
Fight the information war
There is a lesson here.
It is important for Israel to fight the information war, to combat lies and misinformation and tell its side of the story. Doing so helps fortify the international legitimacy of Israel’s actions and gain the sympathy of societies and governments.
But at the end of the day, there are some – many of them simple antisemites – who will never be convinced, because they simply don’t want to be. To them, the Jewish state is always in the wrong, nothing it does will ever be right, and no evidence – including photos of dead Jewish babies – will change their minds.
Israel must invest its efforts in reaching the large majority of people around the world whose minds haven’t yet been made up but who are mostly decent and well-intentioned. They must be the target of Israel’s international media efforts. Trying to change the minds of those blinded by hate and impervious to reality is a waste of our spokespeople’s breath and our nation’s resources.