Murder of the grandmother in the livestream: Hamas’s new terror tactic

“I felt hopeful for a moment and then confused – and then there was just terror,” Keren de Vita told the New York Times. In a livestream on Facebook, she saw how her friends, the Idans family, were captured by Hamas on October 7 in Kibbutz Nahal Otz.

Crying children in the hands of the terrorists hugging their parents, the seven-year-old son asking for his sister, the live-streamed horror lasted 43 minutes until the attackers finally left the house and kidnapped the father of the family. Gaza. They left the rest of the family behind. The missing daughter was later found dead.

Similar atrocities are also known from other families. “At 7 a.m. I had the nightmare of my life,” wrote the young Israeli Mor Bayder on Instagram. A terrorist broke into her grandmother’s house and killed her. He then filmed her with her phone and published the recording on the lady’s Facebook account. “That’s how we found out,” Bayder continued.

A weapon “like we’ve never seen before”

The events bear witness to unprecedented brutality. “We are not psychologically prepared for this,” Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times. Hamas’ new tactics turn social media into a weapon ‘like we’ve never seen before’.

Some Israelis are against deleting the accounts

The big social media companies are in a quandary when it comes to this kind of psychological warfare. On the one hand, they don’t want to delete the hijacked accounts because this is the only way relatives can get information or signs of life from the kidnapped. On the other hand, they must prevent violence from spreading. In the case of the Idan family mentioned above, Facebook decided to set the account to private and only remove the livestream video.

As usual on the Internet, parts of it have already been copied and are still relatively easy to find. Israeli and American schools therefore advised parents to temporarily delete social media apps on their children’s mobile phones.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has now responded to the controversy – also to pressure from the EU. In a blog post, the company wrote that it would lower the threshold for algorithms to automatically block violent videos. Certain hashtags will also be completely blocked and the comment function will be temporarily limited for users in the Middle East.

Not all relatives of the kidnapped Israelis agree with the new rules. Many of them scour the Internet looking for signs of life from relatives. It is often the last chance for them to obtain information. Some have formed groups to search for signs of life and share news of the whereabouts of the missing. According to the Israeli government, nearly 200 people have been abducted to Gaza by Hamas. (bzbasel.ch)