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Hamas hostage videos are cruel, manipulative, revealing. Experts expect more.
The latest hostage video released by Hamas is disturbing, manipulative and revealing. Three women sit on cheap plastic chairs pushed against a tiled wall, somewhere in Gaza. It looks like a waiting room for some fearful appointment.
Are they underground, in the militants’ vast tunnel network? Unclear. There’s an electrical outlet. The lighting is bright. The captives are dressed in clean clothes. They appear uninjured, physically at least.
The woman in the center, Danielle Aloni, 44, speaks directly to the camera. She begins, “Hello, Bibi Netanyahu, we are in captivity, in Hamas captivity, 23 — how many days? — 23 days … ”
This helps establish when the video was made — or when their captors planned to release it, on Monday. In the short clip, Aloni delivers a harsh message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, describing his “failures.” By the end of the video, Aloni is shouting, her voice rough: “Free, free us now! Free their civilians, free their prisoners, free us, free us all, let us return to our families now. Now! Now! Now!”
Aloni was captured along with five other family members, including 3-year-old twins, from the Nir Oz kibbutz during Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day in the country’s history.
The release of the 75-second video Monday created a rush of emotions in Israel. It was a gut punch. The Prime Minister’s Office called the video “cruel psychological propaganda” and again compared Hamas to ISIS.
Still, one father was ecstatic to see his daughter alive.
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