Hamas, October 7, and Israeli Victims: How Belgian Media Turned the Story Upside Down

The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 was not a normal escalation and not a tragic incident in an endless conflict. It was an organised terrorist attack on civilians: on families, young people, the elderly, women, and children. Yet over the past years, Belgian media have shifted the moral focus of their reporting from the very beginning. Hamas, the events of October 7, the hostages, and the Israeli victims did not remain central. Instead, the focus became almost exclusively on Israel as the alleged aggressor. That is not balanced journalism. It is a dangerous reversal of reality.

The report by Israeli experts led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy makes this journalistic failure even more disturbing. The Civil Commission on October 7 Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children describes in its reports how extreme sexual violence, humiliation, deliberate mutilation, and the slaughter of innocent civilians, as well as the targeted attack on families, were a strategic part of Hamas’s terror on October 7. According to the recent report, the commission based its findings on hundreds of testimonies and extensive analysis of visual material. AP reported that the report states that sexual violence was a systematic and integral part of the attack and its aftermath.

Free Palestine from Hamas

Precisely such a report should have been widely discussed in Belgian media. Not once, briefly, not hidden deep inside a live blog, not treated as an uncomfortable side issue, but as a main topic. Yet this report remains largely undiscussed or only marginally present in Belgian reporting. That is telling. When reports, or even unverified claims, appear about Palestinian suffering, they are often followed by days of analysis, opinion pieces, studio discussions, and endless repetition of the same message in slightly different wording.

Regarding the reporting in the mainstream media in Belgium, see the JID report of August 12, 2025.

When Israeli experts led by Elkayam-Levy speak about rape, sexual violence, and the destruction of families by Hamas, the media remain strikingly silent. That silence is not neutral. Silence is also an editorial choice. And in this case, that choice is painful, because it once again shows how little room there is in Belgian media for the full truth about Israeli victims. The victims of October 7 seem to exist only as a historical trigger for the war in Gaza. Their names, their stories, their final moments, their kidnapped relatives, and their trauma are disappearing further and further from view. In recent years, reporting on Israeli victims was mostly marginal and appeared mainly when a hostage was released. There was hardly any reporting on the massacre and the hostages, the endless rocket attacks on Israel with innocent civilian victims, the evacuees from the north and from the areas next to Gaza, or the environmental disasters caused by wildfires triggered by attacks.

Of course, journalism may be critical of Israeli politics and military decisions. No government is above scrutiny.

But criticism of Israel must never mean that Hamas’s terror is softened, or that reporting by Hamas or by the state media outlet Al Jazeera from Qatar, a state sponsor of terror, is accepted as truth, while at the same time every report from Israel is repeatedly dismissed as unverified or as propaganda.

Anyone who begins the story with Israeli bombardments and not with October 7 is telling the public a half-truth. And half-truths are especially dangerous in wartime.

Because the war did not begin out of nowhere. The war began with Hamas. With death squads. With civilians slaughtered in their homes. With young people being hunted down and murdered at a music festival. With families wiped out. With people, wounded or not, dragged into Gaza and held there, without medical care, without help or visits from the Red Cross, while Doctors Without Borders, War Child, women’s organisations, and the UN remained collectively silent about this for years.

According to the report “Kinocide: The Weaponisation of Families” by the Civil Commission, Hamas and its collaborators attacked the Israeli civilian population on October 7, killing more than 1,200 people and abducting more than 250 people to Gaza.

There is also an uncomfortable truth here that Belgian media too often avoid: not only Hamas, but also the Gazans who took part in the attack, guarded hostages, withheld information, or benefited from their captivity bear responsibility. That does not mean that every Gazan civilian is collectively guilty. But it is equally dishonest to pretend that the hostages were held only by an abstract terrorist organization, separate from an environment in which people saw them, guarded them, hid them, or failed to help them. Across Gaza, not one hostage was helped by a Gazan. It was so bad that during release gatherings, large crowds of agitated Gazans harassed the hostages, who ultimately felt safer beside Hamas terrorists than beside “innocent” Gazan civilians.

Hostages were not held in a vacuum. They were held in homes, tunnels, and hospitals in Gaza. They could have been helped. People could have stood up. People could have passed on information. People could have refused to cooperate. But many hostages remained prisoners of Hamas and its network for months, and in some cases for years. That fact deserves far more attention than it receives in Belgian media.

Yet the dominant frame has changed. Gaza became the entire story. October 7 was reduced to context. Hamas disappeared behind words such as “conflict,” “cycle of violence,” and “war.” And Israeli victims were increasingly treated as a footnote to Israeli guilt. In doing so, the moral chronology is reversed: first came the murders, rapes, abductions, and hostages; only then came the Israeli military response.

That order matters. When it is blurred, public judgment and the narrative are changed.

Israel is then no longer seen as a democratic, free country responding to a massive terrorist attack, but as the original perpetrator, an occupying power, and an apartheid state. Hamas is no longer seen as the organization that deliberately attacked civilians, but as a secondary player in a broader anti-Israel narrative. Israeli victims are no longer people with names and faces, but an uncomfortable reminder that complicates the story.

That is exactly what journalism should resist. Belgian media should help their public understand complexity, not consume moral simplicity. They should keep repeating what Hamas did on October 7. They should keep the hostages at the center. They should discuss, question, and explain the Elkayam-Levy report, because the seriousness of the allegations demands journalistic attention.

It is also striking how differently skepticism is applied. When accusations are made against Israel, the tone is often firm and morally charged. When the issue is rape, sexual violence, and torture by Hamas, there is suddenly caution, distance, and doubt. Of course, war facts must be investigated. But critical investigation is not the same as looking away. Selective skepticism is not journalism, but ideology. In no other war involving a Western country has there been such moral outrage. The Western world carried out many attacks in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, yet these were hardly reported on in the same way. The genocide in Sudan, where Islamists are currently exterminating the Black population, receives hardly any coverage. China’s imprisonment and sterilisation of Uyghurs in concentration camps, aimed at erasing them, is not reported on dozens of times a day in the media.

The innocent victims in Gaza do not need to disappear from view to do justice to Israeli victims. But in practice, that is what has happened. Belgian reporting has for years presented the public with a story in which Gaza was constantly visible while Israeli mourning faded further and further into the background. As a result, a false image could emerge: Israel as aggressor, Hamas as background, October 7 as a detail.

Mature journalism should be capable of doing better. It should be able to say: Hamas committed a barbaric terrorist attack on October 7. It should be able to say: Israeli victims deserve lasting recognition. It should be able to say: hostages were held and abused in Gaza, and anyone who held them or failed to help them when they could have done so bears responsibility. And it should be able to say: a report about rape, sexual violence, and the destruction of families must not remain largely undiscussed simply because it does not fit the dominant narrative.

That is the real failure of Belgian media. Not that they are critical of Israel. Criticism is part of journalism. The failure is that they have too often allowed Hamas, the events of October 7, and Israeli victims to disappear from the centre of the story. Anyone who wants to tell the truth must return to the beginning. To the terror. To the hostages. To the rapes. To the slaughtered families. To the Israeli victims.

Without that beginning, every analysis of what came afterward is incomplete and factually incorrect. And incomplete journalism is not journalistic balance, but a moral choice.

The collective Belgian media have thrown themselves into activist reporting. It is time for that to change, and for neutral objectivity to return - beginning with the public broadcaster, which is funded by our tax money as an independent and neutral organisation.

Image credits: Peter Steiner via Unsplash