As Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli villages outside Gaza on the morning of October 7th, killing roughly fourteen hundred people, some paused to take videos of themselves with Jewish children at Kibbutz Holit. In one piece of footage, a fighter in an Adidas T-shirt vigorously pats the back of a crying baby who is pressed against his shoulder—the same shoulder carrying his Kalashnikov. Another fighter, wearing a camouflage uniform, bandages the foot of an Israeli boy of toddler age, then puts the boy on his lap while jerking the crying baby back and forth in a stroller. A camera zooms in on the confused face of the boy as an unseen fighter, speaking broken English, instructs him to repeat the Arabic word meaning “in the name of God.” “Say bismillah,” the fighter says. The boy complies, in a soft Hebrew accent.

Hamas released the bismillah video on a Telegram channel six days after the attack. At a moment when the Western news media, and some major Arab outlets, were full of reports about the many civilians who were slaughtered, and Israeli officials were likening Hamas to ISIS, the footage was apparently Hamas’s rebuttal. At one point in the video, a masked fighter holds up the two children and addresses the camera: “Look at the mercy in our hearts. These kids—we didn’t kill them like you do.” (At least six children died from rocket fire on October 7th, and Israel’s Channel 12 has named at least nineteen others killed by militants.)

If Hamas meant to humanize its fighters to audiences in Israel or the West, the video was stunningly counterproductive. The group’s propagandists hid the identity of the fighters by blurring out their faces and, in most scenes, distorting their voices. The resulting faceless growls made them look and sound only more monstrous. The Kalashnikovs next to the children, the ungentle pushing of the stroller, the Jewish child goaded into Muslim prayer, the absence of the boys’ parents—the whole scene was alarming. (The children turned out to be brothers: Negev, who is three, and Eshel, who is about five months old. Their mother was killed in the raid, and their father was away. Hamas brought the children into Gaza, but released them almost immediately.)

Michael Milshtein, a retired Israeli intelligence official who specializes in analyzing Palestinian media, told us that the bismillah video “demonstrates Hamas’s arrogance toward the West—that they think all Westerners are stupid, that, if they show images of these barbarian terrorists holding babies and hugging them, people in the West will say, ‘Oh, they are so sweet. We were wrong about them!’ It’s ridiculous.” Many Israelis have observed that their government’s vulnerability to the October 7th attack showed a profound failure to understand Hamas. Milshtein argued that Hamas’s release of the bismillah footage, which displays little comprehension of the audience in Israel and the West, proved that the misunderstanding was mutual.

Yet to Palestinians and other Arab viewers—a very different audience, and one that is more important to Hamas—the awkward bismillah video served its purpose. It was posted to Al Jazeera’s Facebook page for Egypt, and has been viewed more than 1.4 million times. Nearly seventy-five thousand viewers have liked it, and nearly three thousand have left comments, many of them admiring. One commenter praised “the morals of the fighters of the Islamic resistance.”

Three days later, another surreal video appeared, this one from an Israeli hostage who identifies herself as a twenty-one-year-old named Mia Shem. In the footage, her dazed eyes seemingly dart to read cue cards as she delivers a statement about the medical care that Hamas has provided for a serious wound to her arm. “They are taking care of me and giving me medicines, everything is fine,” she says flatly, avoiding the subject of who caused her injury in the first place. Since then, Hamas has released videos showing a few handovers of released hostages—including one in which an elderly Jewish Israeli bids “shalom” to her Palestinian captor.

However unpersuasive or ham-fisted such propaganda might seem in the West, Ghaith al-Omari—a former adviser to the Western-backed Palestinian Authority and a longtime opponent of Hamas—told us that such videos had convinced many Arabs that the group’s fighters, unlike ISIS, “are humane and respect Islamic laws of war.” He added, “It has resonated throughout the Arab world. This is now the line you see not only in Hamas media but in most Arab media, in Jordan, Egypt, and North Africa. The dominant narrative has become the narrative of Hamas.”

Hamas began shaping that narrative moments after its fighters streamed through the breached barriers surrounding Gaza. As the assault unfolded, a split screen on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV network juxtaposed footage of burning cars in Israeli towns with a video of a cluster of young Israeli men whose arms are tied behind their backs. A news anchor, addressing Palestinians everywhere, declared, “This picture is your picture, this might is your might, this flood is your flood, and this blessed action is for all of you!”

A review of Hamas’s propaganda on October 7th makes clear that a major objective of the group’s assault was to spark a broader uprising among the Palestinians of the West Bank. After the news anchor delivered the “blessed action” soliloquy, the network cut to a recorded message from Saleh al-Arouri, the bellicose deputy chief of Hamas’s political bureau, who explicitly urged Palestinians to rise up against both the Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the soldiers protecting them. The Israeli military “won’t be able to attend to confrontations on other fronts,” Arouri said. “After today, no one can hold back his rifle, bullet, pistol, knife, car, or Molotov cocktail.” Similar calls for an uprising in the West Bank were made in statements released during the attack by the Hamas military commander Mohammed al-Deif and by the masked Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida. The statements were broadcast repeatedly on Al-Aqsa TV and on Al Jazeera.

Although no West Bank uprising materialized, Hamas propagandists were still revelling days later in a triumph measured in bloodshed. On October 9th, as Israel was successfully repelling the last remaining Palestinian fighters from its territory, Shadi Asfour, a reporter for Al-Aqsa TV, announced from a hospital inside the Strip that “the men of the resistance are still clashing right now on the lands usurped in 1948, in the occupied interior, and reports coming from those lands are that the morale is very high.” Israeli officials at the time had confirmed the deaths of more than seven hundred citizens. “We know that these numbers are certainly false,” Asfour said. “It will soon be acknowledged that the numbers are rising!”

Observers on all sides of the conflict agree that Israel’s launch of a brutal air campaign against Gaza has rallied sympathy for the Strip’s beleaguered residents and buttressed Hamas’s story of heroic resistance. Talal Okal, a columnist in Gaza for the Ramallah-based newspaper Al-Ayyam, said of the media war, “Honestly and objectively, Israel defeated itself.”

But Al Jazeera, owned by the rulers of Qatar, has done the most to disseminate images of the devastation caused by the air strikes. The network, which has more cameras in Gaza than any other news outlet, has repeatedly broadcast footage of bodies trapped in rubble and of anguished parents clutching children wrapped in shrouds. The network’s anchors and reporters have hewn closely to Hamas’s preferred vocabulary for the conflict, speaking about “resistance fighters” battling against an “occupation army.” One of Al Jazeera’s most prominent journalists, Majed Abdulhadi, celebrated Hamas’s attack as it happened by reciting a kind of prose poem: after rhapsodizing at length about the astonished surprise of an Israeli soldier who was captured in his tank, Abdulhadi concluded that, “in one fell swoop,” the assault had “wiped away dark layers of despair.” The video clip is still circulating on Arab social media, where it has been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, has covered many conflicts between Israel and Hamas, and the group’s leaders have sometimes saluted his coverage for conveying their perspective. In an interview on the network in 2021, Dahdouh, who is Palestinian, said that about twenty members of his family had been killed in clashes with Israel. (At least four relatives belonged to the militant group Islamic Jihad.) Dahdouh continued, “Perhaps this is among the difficult moments in the life of a Palestinian journalist—when he goes to report on an incident and discovers the incident is his brother or cousin.”