War On Dignity: Hamas’ Theatre of Martyrdom January 2026,
January 2026, Article written Anonymously
Introduction:
Conflict in Gaza and Israel does not merely begin with the launch of a rocket or the breach of a fragile fence; it begins in the human nervous system, in the calibrated attempt to make another population feel watched, unsafe, and cornered. Psychological warfare in this context designates a spectrum of practices, from threats, to propaganda, and humiliation, deployed to weaken the adversary’s will to resist and, sometimes, live.
Hamas operates inside this as an actor whose power lies less in ballistic capacity than in its ability to ground fear in the Levant’s soil. From suicide bombings in the 1990s consciously modelled on earlier Lebanese precedents, to the then October 7 attack, its campaigns exploit vulnerability at all costs. Meanwhile, international humanitarian law has increasingly acknowledged the psychological and emotional consequences of such tactics. Legal debates over psychological operations now ask at what point fear‑inducing tactics become unlawful coercion or inhuman treatment. Leading the movement rests the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions which confronts “prolonged mental harm”, particularly when civilians as a population are targeted, rather than combatants as individuals. The psychological front that has opened in Gaza accordingly opens a deeper question: to what extent can international law, and should it, adjust to a battlefield that has shifted from the physical to the moral, where psychological humiliation degrades human dignity?
This article takes Hamas’ “theatre of martyrdom” as a lens through which to explore that question. It traces how psychological operations (PsyOps) converted Hamas’ biographical tragedy into a political myth, how it also uses hostage‑taking and mediated violence to induce mass anxiety, and how its media transform platforms into a drama of revenge and redemption. Situating these practices within wider debates on PsyOps, the analysis asks what it means to speak of dignity in a conflict where cognitive manipulation a weapon in its own right.
1.1 Birth of a Counter-Myth: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
While Israel weaponises humiliation to dominate, Hamas weaponises trauma to mobilise and attack; both convert suffering into strategy, turning dignity into yet another instrument, much like a rocket or an M16.
During the early days of the First Intifada in 1987, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a partially blind and quadriplegic cleric, galvanised a nascent movement born from Palestinian fury against Israeli occupation and Palestinian disillusionment with secular nationalism. This movement – Hamas -has evolved not only into a militant Islamist organisation but also into a master of psychological warfare.
Yassin’s personal story is central to this counter-myth. Born in 1936 in al-Jura, later incorporated into the State of Israel, he experienced displacement during the Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled and/or fled from their homes. In Hamas’ narrative, his broken body becomes a living “martyr in advance,” proof of resistance as a charismatic template.
By the 1960s and 1970s, Yassin was deeply influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, grafting its ideology into the Gazan context through the establishment of Mujama al-Islamiya in 1973, a network dedicated to Islamic education, welfare, and charity This network was not only a social safety net but a proto-information infrastructure: mosques, clinics, schools, and youth groups provided the channels through which narratives of sacrifice, and religious duty could be disseminated long before Hamas formalised its military wing.
Israeli authorities initially tolerated and occasionally facilitated the growth of this Islamist charity as a counterweight to the PLO and other secular forces, a classic divide-and-rule miscalculation that underestimated the political potential of Islamist mobilisation. This early tolerance ceded discursive ground to an actor whose comparative advantage would turn out to be psychological mobilisation.
Yassin’s arrest in 1984 on charges related to weapons smuggling, his imprisonment, and subsequent release in a 1985 prisoner exchange further deepened his “aura” of sacrifice. When the First Intifada erupted in December 1987, Yassin and his comrades seized the moment to launch Hamas as both a militant and ideological movement, explicitly positioning it as an Islamic Resistance Movement dedicated to armed struggle (jihad) and the establishment of Islamic governance.
Hamas’s founding charter articulated a dual strategy. The first declared goal aimed to “liberate Palestine” through jihad, and a mobilising approach that recognised the movement’s structural weakness relative to Israel’s high-tech military and intelligence apparatus. This structural weakness was not denied but instead used, and - often - abused; it became the basis for a carefully crafted “victimised underdog” identity. It represented itself in a David vs. Goliath duel in which the smaller actor claims moral superiority precisely because it fights from a position of dispossession and injury.
The movement thus set its sights against three targets simultaneously: Israeli occupation, secular Palestinian factions (primarily Fatah and the PLO), and international political structures perceived as complicit in Palestinian marginalisation. Its psychological warfare strategy sought to weave narratives of victimhood, religious duty, and resistance into a single, emotionally resonant story that could mobilise Palestinians, attract support from the broader Muslim world, and unsettle Israeli society - and that they achieved.
From the mid-1990s, Hamas systematically reframed suicide bombings as “martyrdom operations” (‘amaliyyat istishhadiyya), directly appropriating a repertoire that Hezbollah had pioneered in Lebanon in the 1980s. Hezbollah’s spectacular truck bombings against U.S. Marines and French paratroopers in Beirut in 1983, and subsequent attacks on Israeli forces in South Lebanon, had already demonstrated that small organisations could shift the policies of occupiers through highly mediatised acts of self-sacrifice, in which the bomber became a “living martyr” whose death could only alter the balance.
Hamas extended this precedent into the Palestinian context, but with a national-Islamic twist. Its suicide attacks on buses, cafés, and markets inside Israel in the 1990s and early 2000s were framed as altruistic martyrdom rather than nihilistic violence. Effectively, it produced a balance of terror.
1.2 The Day Fear Went Live: October 7
October 7 operationalises a doctrine in which physical violence is only one of the first phases; the ulterior battlefield is psychological. The Washington Institute’s “Hostages of the Mind” study argues that Hamas used the attack to wage cognitive warfare, turning hostages, civilian casualties, and media narratives into instruments to paralyse Israeli leadership, fracture public unity, and manipulate international opinion. By demonstrating that Israel’s technological superiority could be circumvented in a single morning, Hamas sought to impose a new psychological order - that of no system can guarantee safety, and the state cannot fully protect its citizens.
A central layer of this doctrine is visual. Fighters wore body and helmet cameras, dashcams and security cameras in southern Israel captured scenes of killings, kidnappings, and destruction that were then circulated on social media and messaging apps. Human Rights Watch’s digital investigations lab verified multiple such videos, confirming time, location, and authenticity using satellite imagery, showing incidents of deliberate killings that they classify as apparent war crimes.
At its core, the translation of this doctrine on ground is simple: hostage-taking.. The Washington Institute study emphasises that the abduction of 251 people, including infants, the elderly, women, soldiers, and foreign nationals, was not an improvised by-product. These documents even detail how to categorise hostages by emotional and bargaining value, prioritising groups like children and the elderly for their heightened mental impact.
In this framework, hostages serve at least four functions: they shield Hamas physically by constraining Israeli rules of engagement, they paralyse Israeli decision-makers, who must constantly weigh military options against the risk to captives, they fragment Israeli society, as families, political factions, and protest movements pressure the government in different directions (“bring them home now” vs. “destroy Hamas first”), and they shape international narratives by weaponising empathy. Videos of hostages like Sasha Trufanov, Nadav Popplewell, and Liri Albak are thus not incidental cruelty, they are timed releases in an influence marketing campaign.
The mental-health data show that this was not merely symbolic. A national cohort study published in early 2024 found that after October 7 prevalences of probable PTSD, depression, and anxiety among Israeli civilians rose dramatically: around 29% screening positive for PTSD and over 40% for depression and generalised anxiety, roughly double the levels recorded two months before the attack. Direct exposure to the attack was associated with more than triple the odds of probable PTSD and more than double the odds of depression at later time points. This is why the event feels like an “epidemic of collective psychological injury”.
1.3 Broadcasting the Sanctimonious
Hamas’ control over the narrative surrounding October 7 constitutes a methodologically precise PsyOp, embedded in its broader campaign of cognitive and information warfare.
Al Aqsa TV - Hamas’ official media presence - has long served as a propaganda engine within Gaza. In the aftermath of October 7th, this channel intensified its output of emotive, highly graphic content, threading religious symbolism with its political legitimacy. Data collected by VoxPol (2025) underscores the speed and precision of Hamas’ digital mobilisation. Between October 7 and 9, the al-Qassam Brigades’ Telegram channel expanded from 205 000 to over 629 000 subscribers, a 207% increase. Within those same days, the channel disseminated 74 propaganda items, 23 of which contained graphic depictions of Israeli military casualties. Parallel pro-Hamas networks exceeded 600 posts during the same interval, saturating the digital sphere with imagery meant to destabilise not just Israeli morale but also the lens through which global audiences viewed the conflict. This ontology of sacrifice and explosion of appetite for “revenge” provides moral scaffolding for continued armed resistance. Later, the child deprived of toys becomes the inheritor of heroic destiny, thus, the propaganda cycle gets sustained once more through pedagogy.
Internationally, Hamas projects this narrative reframing itself as both victim and avenger. The inflation of casualty imagery, coupled with viral social-media appeals for humanitarian aid, extends into the emotional economy of spectatorship. Content tagged “Please, don’t scroll,” documented by TIME (August 2024), exemplifies how pathos-driven communication mobilises pity. Finally, Hamas’ deployment of captured Israeli SIM cards and the use of live Hebrew-language messaging during and after the attacks rendered the distinction between combatant and civilian, front and rear, effectively meaningless. In Hamas’ strategy, the information environment is not ancillary to the battlefield, it is the battlefield.
1.4 The Dance of Death
Much like in tango, the leader turns the follower in the direction they may move in, and if such direction is taken it is only for the leader chose it. This dynamic encapsulates Hamas’ multifaceted strategy to immobilise its opponent not through direct force but through PsyOps. The group’s warfare operates on a logic of containment: limiting Israel’s scope of movement by manipulating its space.
The key to this dramatic duet is the rocket attacks mounted regularly by Hamas on southern Israeli cities. Such attacks are more terrifying spectacle than military operation, as they exert a semblance of ever-present siege. This terror ends not where it is aimed but where it may be imagined to be aimed. Each launch, whether intercepted or not, forces Israel’s civilians into stochastic terror.
Since the historic October 7 attack, when Hamas’s first wave of 5,000 rockets hit Tel Aviv, there has been a rhythm of intermittent rocket fire. By June 2024, the Israel Defence Forces reported more than 19,000 unguided rockets launched from Gaza and Lebanon, most intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system but sufficient to reach civilian areas nonetheless. The citizens of Sderot and Ashkelon, living in the shadow of air raids sirens, personify the absolute impossibility of any sort of routine. Here, Hamas’ choreographies Israel as cautious and conditioned.
Ultimately, Hamas’ strategy is less about territorial gain and more about rhythm management: setting the tempo of fear and fatigue, then letting the cycle play out - repeat. By compelling both society and military to dance to its unpredictable cadence, the follower remains reactive, never autonomous.
Conclusion:
As the final frame fades in Paradise Now - the 2005 Palestinian film by Hany Abu-Assad two men in white suits, strapped with explosives, share a quiet cigarette on a bus bound for Tel Aviv, their faces lit by the calm certainty of their chosen “liberation”. The director cuts not to detonation but to ambiguity: a freeze-frame of departure, leaving audiences suspended between their own empathy for the situation and its insurmontable dread. They are complicit in a narrative that humanises the bomber while indicting the occupation. This cinematic shot captures the essence of Hamas: violence not as end, but as a means.
This article has traced that theatre from its origins in Sheikh Yassin’s broken body, a living emblem of defiance, to the orchestrated chaos of October 7th, where body cams and Telegram surges collapsed broadcasting, turning hostages into emotional leverage and rockets into a relentless tango-like rhythm. Hamas wields trauma as Israel wields humiliation: both convert human fragility into a - sort of - doctrinal power.
International law, tethered to tangible wounds, remains partially blind to this cognitive carnage: the Geneva Conventions prohibit terror but not its mediatised amplification. Like Paradise Now’s unresolved tension, the Levant’s conflict demands more than ceasefires, it calls for ethical frameworks that criminalise psychological orchestration, and both sides’ endless reel of revenge.
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