The Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group and Hamas published videos on Thursday and Friday of Israeli hostages Rom Braslavksi and Evyatar David, respectively, showing each starving and emaciated.
Ordinarily, it might be considered self-defeating to publish video evidence of one’s own atrocities. It is a war crime to hold hostages and deny them food and Red Cross visits, and to make a spectacle of prisoners of war.
The reason Palestinian terror groups publish these videos is to exert psychological pressure on the Israeli public, as the videos create a sense of distress and amplify political pressure on the government to stop the war.
Photographs that were presented by mainstream media outlets over the past week that purported to show starving Palestinian children were later found to have shown children with other medical conditions instead.
Israel has continued to surge humanitarian aid to Gaza, despite the ineptitude of the United Nations in delivering it, and despite the fact that much of the aid that enters Gaza is stolen by Hamas and other armed groups.
Very little, if any, humanitarian aid reaches the hostages. Last year, medicines that were supposed to have been delivered to Israeli hostages by Qatar were later found, unopened, by Israeli troops in Gaza.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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