CNN Airs Graphic Footage of Hamas ‘Gunman Sawing at the Necks of Dead Israelis’ In Segment Asking Is Hamas the New ISIS?
CNN’s Matthew Chance took a deep dive this week into the tactics of Hamas and the comparison between Hamas’s barbaric tactics and those of ISIS.
“Israel is accusing Hamas of carrying out, quote, ‘psychological torture,’ after the terrorist group released three videos in 24 hours featuring the same three hostages being held in Gaza. The first two showed 53-year-old Yossi Sharabi, 38-year-old Itai Svirsky, and 26-year-old Noa Argamani. The last video appeared to show Yoshi’s body and Itai’s body, with Noa saying that they were killed in an Israeli air strike,” began Jake Tapper, introducing the segment.
“The video was highly edited and, obviously, Noa is speaking under duress, being held by Kidnappers,” Tapper continued, adding:
The IDF denies that the two men were killed in an Israeli strike, and they insist they did not strike and don’t strike where they think hostages are being held. The government of Israel continues to underline that Hamas is not an Arab government with which they are at war, that Hamas is a terrorist group not unlike ISIS.
CNN’s Matthew Chance takes a look now at this comparison for us. But first, we must warn our viewers. The images in this report are extremely graphic.
“It’s hard to imagine the sheer brutality of the rampage,” Chance begins, adding:
In more than 20 Israeli communities, Hamas gunmen moving house to house, room to room in an orgy of violence. You can barely show the horrors of October the 7th, but the torture, mutilation and killing of more than 1200 people, as well as abductions of hostages still held in Gaza, point to a radical, gut-wrenching shift in tactics.
This is one video shared with CNN by an Israeli source that we are showing you. Security cameras at the Nir Oz kibbutz in southern Israel show a knife-wielding gunman sawing at the necks of dead Israelis, evidence of beheadings, cementing an Israeli view that Hamas, is now akin to jihadi groups like al-Qaida and Islamic State or ISIS.
ISIS, which controlled parts of Iraq and Syria before being dispersed in a multinational effort, also used beheadings, torture and sexual violence against their captives humans. While the two groups used similar brutal tactics, their goals remained different.
“But is it becoming, is Hamas becoming more, more like ISIS?” Chance asks Prof. Peter Neumann.
“So I would say that ideologically it’s not becoming more like ISIS. But tactically and strategically it is. It is widening its area of operations. It’s considering terrorist attacks abroad. And also its tactics are becoming more like ISIS.”
“Recently, Western security services say they’ve identified several Hamas threats. Police in Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands making arrests in suspected Hamas-linked plots to strike European targets,” Chance adds, concluding:
This amid growing international outrage over Israel’s hardline response. And that response, in which thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israeli strikes, has further thrust Hamas into the spotlight, raising concerns, say analysts, that the October the 7th rampage and the Gaza war could inspire a whole new generation of terror attacks in the West. Attacks with groups other than Hamas exploiting the crisis groups.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
