As if the world needed any more evidence of Palestinian terrorist organizations’ esteem for human life — whether it’s at the hand of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or the many other militant groups who have operated in the region for decades — the world received it on August 1, 2025.
Hamas released a new propaganda video of Evyatar David, kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023 during the Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im, just three miles from the Gaza border.
Most sources believe only 20 hostages being held there are still alive. The deceased bodies of another 30 remain in the hands of Hamas.
The new video gives a first-hand view of Evyatar’s current living quarters — a gray covered mattress inside a narrow concrete tunnel, barely wide enough to hold his body.
Three white sheets of paper hang on the wall, each showing hand-drawn calendars. In the square boxes, one can make out the meals he logs for each day: no meal, lentils, beans, and, chillingly, “don’t know” — all repeated for various days of the months.
After reciting various criticisms of the Israeli government, almost certainly dictated to him by his captors, Evyatar is forced to dig what he says he believes will be his own grave, in the dirt floor of the narrow tunnel.
The problem with trying to reconcile the video with the suffering of the Palestinian people, and moreover, with the overwhelming media narratives that the suffering comes at the hand of the Israeli military, who are blocking food distribution, is the voice of the Palestinian population itself.
Hamas has been starving its own people for decades, since it won a landslide legislative election victory in 2006, yet most of the Palestinian public continues to support the militant group’s leadership. This is one reason that the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority has not been able to extend its governance from the West Bank, to include the Gaza strip and thus control all of the Palestinian territories. The massive tunnel network lying underneath Gaza and parts of bordering Israel proper, were built with resources intended for the Palestinian public’s infrastructure — its housing, schools, hospitals, places of worship, and businesses. The food that does somehow make its way in always seems to reach the Hamas leadership, ensuring their families’ dinner tables are always full.
This is not only evident from the video of Evyatar, where a well-fed arm, twice the thickness of Evyatar’s arm, hands him a can of beans in one part of the August 1 propaganda video. Numerous released hostages from October 7 have testified that their captors sat in adjacent rooms to them, feasting on the grand meals. Similarly, many released hostages tell of the Palestinian family homes in which they were held captive, where the children taunted them with food.
Yet, the Palestinian people have voted over and over again for Hamas and other militant groups to govern them. A 2023 Birzeit University poll showed that over 80 percent of Palestinians supported one of various militant terrorist groups. A 2024 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll showed that only 7 percent of Palestinians in Gaza blamed Hamas for their suffering, while 71 percent supported the events of October 7. A poll later in 2024 saw the support drop to 57 percent, and even further to 39 percent. But while the numbers fluctuated, Hamas still remained the most popular group of choice to govern. Stunningly, almost 90 percent of the Palestinian public polled in 2025 by PCPSR did not believe that Hamas committed the October 7 acts, many of which the world has seen on video.
So, Israel is left to again fight a war on two fronts — one on the ground, and another in the media. And despite the all too convenient narrative that the international community tries to push through its airwaves, no Israeli leader — yet — is so foolish as to allow Hamas to remain in power as part of any deal to end the war.
But this leaves the remaining hostages in precarious position. As their value as bargaining chips continues to decrease with every hostage that either dies or is released, what action will Israel and the U.S. take to force Hamas’s hand? What alternatives do they have to extract the hostages?
Most sources believe only 20 hostages being held there are still alive. The deceased bodies of another 30 remain in the hands of Hamas. Israel’s Arab neighbors are beginning to call on the terrorist group to release the hostages, disarm, and end the war.
Meanwhile, the world waits for the next move from Israel and the U.S. And Christians and Jews pray together that this twenty-first century Auschwitz reenactment ends quickly.
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Andy Niggemann is a freelance journalist who specializes in geopolitics and religion with particular emphasis on the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, Germany, and Israel. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Martin Luther’s Hebrew in Mid-Career and numerous articles in academic and popular publications including Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the Federalist.