Netanyahu Views the Hostages as His Excuse To Restart the Slaughter

February 27, 2025
Jonathan Cook

Western leaders and media are helping bolster a propaganda narrative about the Israeli captives that makes the resumption of Israel’s slaughter all but inevitable

Israel sustained the West’s support for its slaughter in Gaza for 15 months only through an intensive campaign of lies.
It invented particularly heinous Hamas war crimes, such baby beheadings and mass rape, for which no evidence has ever been produced. Conversely, it played down its own, even graver war crimes in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel.
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.
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.
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.
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 favor, 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.
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 leveled 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.
If Hamas might not be quite as evil as western publics have been led to believe – if its members’ behavior 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 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?
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 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.
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. Watch it here:

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 on 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 in 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.
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.
Make no mistake: 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.

Trump’s Gaza plan is Israel’s long-term ethnic cleansing plan

Declan Hayes
Trump set the wheels for further Israeli conquests in motion and there is little most of us outside of the notoriously risk averse Gulf States can or will do about it.
Although the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine made some recent noises about how Europe will continue (?) to bat for Palestine against both Israel and POTUS Trump, we can safely ignore their protestations. The fact of the matter is, because Israel’s ethnic cleansing program is the only game in town, we have to factor all worthwhile analysis around their ongoing plans of reshaping that part of the world in their image.Before zooming in on Israel’s plans for Gaza, which Trump has recently rubber stamped, let’s look at what else is happening in that neck of the woods. Israel currently controls the skies over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and especially Lebanon, whose citizens they insulted by flying over the funeral of former Hezbollah religious leader Hassan Nasrallah. Not only was that the same sort of two finger Israeli salute to the world that Netanyahu gave when he presented POTUS Trump with pagers to mock the victims of Israel’s recent murder campaign in Syria and Lebanon, but it shows that the Israelis don’t care what anyone anywhere thinks of them and their crimes.
Skip over to the old city of Jerusalem and the Israelis are cleansing it of Armenians, in particular but they are also inching the Greek Orthodox Church out with a blank cheque book in one hand and their pliable planning laws in the other. The Orthodox Church has been there since the time of Jesus and, as for the Armenians, as they were famously the first nation to convert to Christianity, unlike their Israeli persecutors, they are not Johnny Come Latelys to the Holy Land.
Not that the Israelis worry about squatters’ rights or any rights but their own. They have decided that God gave them the right to this land and that He threw in oodles of German and American military, logistical and financial aid to sweeten the deal and that is that. The fact that the native Palestinians can produce land title deeds from Ottoman times testifying they own the land is neither here nor there, as God, America and their own kangaroo courts have decreed otherwise.
When I stayed in a refugee camp in Bethlehem. I asked some kids shooting the breeze along the Wall what they did to pass the time; they said nothing, as there was nothing to do. When the young child of the family I stayed with saw a chicken in a cage in Hebron, he was delighted, like a child going to see a zoo would be. The ironic thing there is we passed zoos in Israeli compounds as we drove from Bethlehem to Hebron. Although those compounds are called settlements, they more resemble Manhattan than they do some lonely outpost and the idea of leaving Palestinian kids in to look at their monkeys, giraffes and kangaroos would not cross their minds in a million years as the Palestinians, even to the youngest settler children, are untermensch to be systematically abused as one pleases.
Although the Latin Catholic, Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches devote considerable resources to tending to their Palestinian flocks, because it seems very much like a lost cause, their young emigrate in droves to countries like Chile which has a vibrant Palestinian diaspora. It is either that or eke out a barren existence in their occupied homeland.
And occupied it is, with every Palestinian from the richest to the poorest being in no doubt who calls the shots and who cracks the real as well as the metaphorical whip. As regards the Palestinian National Security Forces, whom I have seen stand side by side with their Israeli counterparts, though they are a fine and healthy bunch of youngsters, they are totally outgunned by the Israelis, who could obliterate them in seconds flat, just like they did when they attacked Arafat in his Ramallah compound. There is nothing they or anyone else can do about the situation.
Well, not quite. Although Jenin and other towns I visited are restless, the Israelis call the shots and they don’t now or have they ever felt bound by any rules of war known to either God or man. Although we can commend the bravery of the Palestinians, it also plays into the hands of the Israelis, who never tire of telling the world how hard and unfair a time the Palestinian natives, whom Netanyahu blames for Hitler’s holocaust, give them.
Moving over towards Gaza, we pass Israel proper, where ethnic cleansing has been a foundational building block even before Israel was established. Not only are they trying to erase all footprints of recent Palestinians but they have demolished the churches by the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. To the Israelis, there is only one narrative that must survive and it is their make believe narrative.
Finally getting to Gaza, we see that it is an open air prison camp for untermensch, so much so that the Israelis who attended that October 7th 2023 rock festival were more oblivious to the inmates than they might have been had a zoo or safari park been at the other side of the fence.
Be that as it may, Trump is right to say that Gaza is uninhabitable, even if he omitted details on why that is the case. How, if given a choice, can you live in a compound that Israel bombs in the manner the Germans bombed the Warsaw Ghetto? How can you hope to have a normal life when the Israelis rob your wife’s lingerie and dress up in them to intimidate her and her children? How, in short, can you live in an Israeli made hell?
That, of course, is the dilemma the Israelis have set for the Gazans, and one does not have to spend too much time remembering how the Americans used poisoned blankets, poisoned water and wide scale buffalo culls to kill off their own braves, who stood in the way of progress.
But there are no prizes for bravery and, as things currently stand, the Gazans will have to vacate either sooner or later. That was Trump’s core message.
And, as for Gaza being prime real estate, not only is that a fact but Israelis have been harping on about that for decades, saying that the Palestinians could build a Las Vegas or Cancun, complete with red light district there, if only they would lie down like Danes.
This line of approach is important for a number of key reasons, the chief political one being that the core of the argument has changed to further marginalise the Palestinians and to say that their mere existence, never mind their legal right to the return of their land in Israel proper, is a roadblock to peace. As three card tricks go, it is an amazing sleight of hand by Israel and her White House enablers.
Although the Gazans are no more onboard with this plan than Geronimo, Cochise and Sitting Bull were onboard to exterminate them, that is of lesser account than it once was because, with the collapse of Syria and the pummeling of Hezbollah, the various paramilitary outfits operating in Gaza are less formidable than they were only a few short years ago. Although Gaza would still not top the list of holiday destinations for most ordinary Israelis, there are sufficient settlers in Hebron, who would be happy to return to Gaza to once again stir the pot.
Whatever about those extremists, we can be sure that the IDF will be back to Gaza again and again until they finally wear down the locals and make them refugees once again. We know this because Israel has been down this very road that Trump has charted before, in 1937, to be precise when the Palestine Royal Commission not only proposed the forced displacement of over 200,000 Palestinians from the Galilee as part of its partition plan but gave supposed precedents from Greece/Turkey and Burma/British India to show how such a system could work.
Although this was seen as unrealistic at the time, Polish-Palestinian warlord David Ben-Gurion was delighted with it as it gave legitimacy to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, “population exchanges” as he called the permanent expulsion and dispossession of two-thirds of Palestinians, in the Nakba of 1948.
As in 1948 with the Nakba, so also with Gaza today, where the locals will have to and go with a vengeance unless Israel and their collaborators, who include Trump’s immediate family and Trump’s major Zionist donors can be stopped.
But, just as with the 1937 Peel Commission, so also has Trump today set the wheels for further Israeli conquests in motion and there is little most of us outside of the notoriously risk averse Gulf States can or will do about it, especially if we do not keep our eye on the onward march of the Zionist cause to transforming their Auschwitz by the sea into the world’s seediest and sleaziest Las Vegas.