Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Hamas “is no different than ISIS. It is no different than al-Qaeda,” Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan told reporters on Sunday, displaying videos of distraught Israelis seized by Hamas gunmen.
Seldom do Israeli diplomats concur with supporters of the Islamic State or al-Qaeda, who have been celebrating the Hamas assault on Israel, reveling in the slaughter. And, in turn, Hamas leaders seem ready to please the baying jihadist crowd — that is, if it carries out its threat to execute captives, Israelis and others, and broadcast the gore.
Such a move would be straight out of the murderous, macabre playbook of ISIS, which perfected the pornography of violence, filming the barbaric beheadings of journalists and foreign aid workers, burning of Jordanians and Turks, and throwing LGBTQ+ individuals off rooftops.
Surely, Hamas doesn’t want to emulate the followers of late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, known for his ruthless brutality and violence. But apparently, it is prepared to.
“From this moment on, we announce that every targeting of our people who are safe in their homes without prior warning will be met with regret by the execution of one of our enemy’s civilian hostages, and we will urgently broadcast this with audio and video,” the Ezzedine al-Qassem Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, announced this week.
Some of the group’s officials have since walked back this dire threat, with Basem Naim, Hamas’ head of international relations, telling the BBC that hostages will be treated in a “dignified way.” And some Gazans, bracing for a catastrophe not of their own making, have told reporters they are appalled at the threat to kill captives.
But Naim’s remarks aren’t reassuring. Hamas has carried out gruesome public executions before, and it has routinely engaged in extrajudicial slayings and torture to punish and intimidate, drawing sharp criticism from international rights organizations.
Additionally, Hamas’ military wing has its own leaders — currently, military commander Mohammed Deif and his deputy Marwan Issa — who often act autonomously and have previously shunned instructions from Hamas’ civilian leaders.
The military wing has never shied away from spilling civilian blood either — Israeli or Palestinian — and, arguably, it doesn’t have all that much to learn from the jihadists of Syria and Iraq, except maybe when it comes to the broadcast of taunting, gruesome videos, which only add to the anguish of relatives already beside themselves with worry. Israeli officials are already counseling people to shut down their social media apps, so they aren’t tortured by the likely broadcasts.
While some outside the Middle East see Hamas as a national liberation group that just wants to break the Israeli siege of Gaza and the West Bank, the truth is, it has always been a ruthless hardline Islamist organization, with the true aim of exorcising Israel and replacing it with a Sunni fundamentalist state.
And it doesn’t really care how it goes about accomplishing this. European and American Hamas sympathizers may be shocked by the images of the slaughter they have seen on social media this week — but it isn’t out of character.
From suicide bombings designed to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible — always framed as retaliation for Israeli actions — to indiscriminate rocket fire, Hamas has never valued individual human life.
And it has never cared about the mayhem, death and destruction it will bring to Palestinians in Gaza through its actions either.
Hamas knows full well that Israel has no choice but to respond to its attack militarily, to target those who planned and ordered the slaughter of Israelis, to wreck the Hamas military machine to try and make Israel safe.
It wants massive Israeli retaliation — that is the strategy.
In short, Palestinians in Gaza are to be used as human shields, so Hamas can blame Israel and whip up sentiment on the “Arab streets” to wreck the “normalization” process, which has moved apace since the Abraham Accords were signed in 2020.
The scenes of death and destruction to come in the coastal enclave of Gaza will also widen the divisions between Western allies on what policies to pursue.
This is where the captives fit in. It isn’t clear exactly how many hostages Hamas currently has — estimates range from 30 up to a possible 200, with Israeli officials saying it has 100 to 150.
And they aren’t all Israelis — some are foreign nationals or dual nationals, thought to include Americans, Germans, Britons, French, Mexicans, Brazilians, 11 Thai nationals and at least one Nepalese citizen.
Their presence is “complicating whatever Israel does next and what form of ground operations it will mount,” said Tobias Borck, a security research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
“There’s a pretty live debate going on now within the Israeli government about what to do, and how much military restraint should be shown because of the hostages. Some hard-right cabinet ministers are suggesting that Israel shouldn’t pay that much heed to the hostages. I would suspect that other countries that do have nationals there in Gaza will be trying to influence the Israeli government to exercise restraint,” he added.
Governments also have different philosophies on how to cope with hostage crises. Some, including Britain and the United States, have a policy against bargaining and negotiating in fear that doing so will only invite more hostage-taking — though, at times, even hardline non-negotiators have broken their own principles, using third parties to bargain for them.
The French, Italian and Spanish governments haven’t admitted to negotiating or facilitating ransom payments to bring home journalists and aid workers captured by ISIS in Syria in 2014, but they are widely believed to have done so. According to Chatham House analysts, from 2013 to 2014, “ISIS gained tens of millions of dollars from Europeans for hostages which accounted for between 3–5 percent of the group’s income for that period.”
Former senior U.S. intelligence official Norman Roule already expects countries will fall out over Gaza hostages. And because so many nations will be involved, he predicts it will become even more complicated than the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when 52 Americans were held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran by revolutionary hardliners.
“Hamas has thrown a rock in the water — you’ve got to pay attention to the ripples. And these ripples are going to go far out, with unpredictable results. Someone is going to go to the Iranians or Turks or Qataris to ask for help to free their people,” he said.
“Remember what happened when an Iranian proxy held Americans in Beirut — that turned into Iran Contra,” Roule added, referencing the secret arms sales made to Iran to free seven American hostages held by Hezbollah, an Islamist paramilitary group with close ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
According to Brock, Hamas doesn’t even need to execute any hostages — just threaten to. “Hamas can play the role of the classic hostage-taker, put the captives on camera to achieve a terrorizing and political effect. When we see people appearing on television screens, that will change political dynamics in Israel and overseas,” he said.
But then who’s going to bet on Hamas being merciful?
