In the Media

Jerusalem Post – 10 August 2025

The images of the starving are horrific. Emaciated bodies, hollow eyes, broken spirits – people who are somehow still alive, yet no longer living.

But no, I’m not referring to the carefully curated scenes from Gaza of Palestinians. I’m talking about the Israeli hostages – those kidnapped, brutalised, and left to rot in tunnels beneath the earth – whose suffering the world seems to have forgotten.

The horrific images of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski are burned into our eyes – their emaciated bodies speaks of the agonising torture, the brutal conditions in which they’re held, and the sheer cruelty of their captors.

This is what real starvation looks like. This is true evil on display.

“Helpless” is how Rom’s mother described the footage. “And so are we,” she added, echoing the thoughts of all those who desperately want them back.

But while we can be shocked, we can’t be surprised. Because we saw this malevolent cruelty in high-definition footage filmed by the terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7 – massacring men, women, and children, while revelling in their own depravity.

Hamas and its terrorist affiliates released these latest videos not just to document their horror, but to taunt grieving families and torture a nation still in trauma – a nation locked in a war that seems to stretch on endlessly.

It’s a sickening calculation: the greater Israel’s pain, the higher their joy.

The empty words of leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron – who called the videos “sickening” and demanded Hamas disarm and release the hostages “unconditionally” – ring hollow. Because where was that strong rhetoric as he, and other leaders like those of Britain and Canada, tripped over themselves in a rush to recognise a Palestinian state?

Instead, they emboldened Hamas – which now openly declares it will never disarm, never surrender, and never stop until a Palestinian state is created with Jerusalem as its capital.

Over the weekend, Ghazi Hamad, a senior member of the Hamas politburo, told Al Jazeera that the wave of Western recognition of a Palestinian state is the “fruits” of the October 7 massacre.

While Hamas gloats, when Australian Government ministers Penny Wong and Anne Aly announced a further $20 million in aid for Gazans they also demanded that Israel “allow immediate and unimpeded aid access into Gaza,” without even mentioning Hamas.

None of this is to discount suffering in Gaza. But Hamas has carefully orchestrated this suffering for maximum impact — preying on a Western world that still doesn’t understand one basic truth.

Israel is fighting a brutal war against a genocidal terror group embedded in a society so radicalised that many ordinary civilians celebrated Israel’s pain – as broken, bloodied bodies were paraded on pickup trucks by terrorists exulting in the slaughter.

And yet much of the world pressures Israel to stop – to give up on hostages like Evyatar and Rom, and to end a war it didn’t start, handing victory to the monsters who did.

If the world redirected even a fraction of the pressure it heaps on Israel toward Hamas – the true instigator of this war – perhaps Hamas would get the message that its time is up, and that the world no longer struggles to tell good from evil.

But no. The world cannot grasp this simplest of concepts. Rewarding terrorism does not lead to peace – it breeds more terror. Feed the beast, and it will only grow hungrier.

The world had a choice: to stand for truth, to defend honour, to confront evil. Instead, it chose appeasement – hoping to buy peace at the cost of its principles.

It has now lost its principles – and will have no peace.

Hamas understands the weakness of the West. It knows that all the noble talk of courage and freedom is hollow. That governments of countries like France, Britain, and Canada – which consider themselves moral beacons – are really just trembling shadows of what they think they are, unwilling to confront genocidal hatred when it doesn’t suit their political narrative.

This moral confusion was reflected over the weekend, when tens of thousands marched in Sydney and Melbourne in so-called “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations. It was supposed to be a march for humanity. But at the protest were antisemitic signs and slogans like ‘Death to the IDF’ and images comparing the Star of David to a Nazi swastika – both captured in photos circulating on social media.

There were no posters of Israeli hostages. No calls for Hamas to surrender.

And while there may have been well-meaning people among the crowd who simply want the war to end, the absence of any condemnation of Hamas – the group that started this war – reveals a sobering truth that history has shown us time and again:

When you meet evil with weakness, it doesn’t vanish.

It grows until one day it consumes you, burying you in forgotten tunnels beneath the earth.

Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).