‘If only we had known’

CNN’s Friday feature on the residents of the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza had the opposite of the outlet’s intended effect. Indeed, the attempt to present its interviewees in a sympathetic light inadvertently backfired.

The piece was a follow-up to a one-on-one sit-down last week between CNN’s Bianna Golodryga and Andrey Kozlov, one of four hostages rescued by Israeli forces on June 8, after eight months of Hamas captivity.

Kozlov, Almog Meir Jan and Shlomi Ziv were located in the home of Ahmed Aljamal and his family. Noa Argamani was found in a nearby house, belonging to Mohamed Ahmad Abu Nar.

All had been brutally abducted on Oct. 7 from the Nova Music festival in southern Israel. Each was imprisoned among “civilians” above ground, rather than in the massive tunnel network underneath the length and breadth of the terrorist enclave. And every one of them was treated to physical, psychological and likely sexual abuse.

Let’s start with CNN’s accurate depiction of the Aljamals, captors of the three men. Ahmed, 74, was a physician, a general practitioner, who also “led the call to prayer at the local mosque, waking early every day to get there before dawn.”

His 36-year-old son, Abdallah, was a freelance journalist “who most recently wrote for the U.S.-based Palestine Chronicle, for which he filed regular dispatches on the war in Gaza.”

Abdallah previously served as a spokesman for Gaza’s Labor Ministry and publicly lauded Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, posting pictures on Facebook of his young son dressed in the terror group’s Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades fatigues.

As per CNN, Abdallah’s sister, Zainab, who was in the family house at the time of the [Israeli] raid, wrote a Facebook post about it: "The Israeli soldiers entered and shot Abdallah’s wife Fatima first, before killing Ahmed and Abdallah," she wrote. Zainab hid with Abdallah’s children under a bed…[She] said in the post…: ‘Since the start of the war, we have been waiting for this moment. We did not know how it would come and in what horrific way it would happen, but we were aware that it would inevitably come.’”

It’s the neighbors’ reactions that the network didn’t realize it was exposing as equally vile. What came across in the report was the mind frame of Gazans, even those not affiliated with Hamas. Take Abu Muhammad el Tahrawi, for instance.

El Tahrawi described Dr. Aljamal as “a pious man,” one who “leads the prayer, then goes back to his home. He didn’t mix with people, didn’t complain about other people, and no one complained about him. He was a man who minded his own business.”

Expressing surprise that Aljamal had been holding hostages in his home, el Tahrawi told CNN, “Had we known, had he told us, we would have taken safety precautions, hide or move [sic] to somewhere else.”

Wow. One might have expected him to say that if he and others in the community had been aware of hostages in their midst, they would have informed Israeli authorities or tried to help the innocent victims in some other way.

But, no. El Tahrawi was referring to the danger of being in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli heroes who swooped into Nuseirat and saved Kozlov, Jan, Ziv and Argamani.

Which brings us to Argamani’s jailers. According to CNN, “local people were reluctant to share many details about [the Abu Nar] family, but they did express surprise and concern that a hostage had been held in their midst.”

Calling Abu Nar “ordinary” and a “normal man,” Khalil al-Kahlot, a civil servant in Gaza, said, “He had young children at home. No one would expect him to hold a hostage like this, in homes and among people.”

Another neighbor, this one anonymous, added, “They are people in Hamas, but we did not know that. If we had known there was something there, no one would have stayed in the area.”

Again, not an ounce of sympathy for the hostages—only distress at not having been told in time to relocate. In this context, it’s worth reiterating what I wrote a mere four days before “Operation Arnon” in Nuseirat (renamed after National Counterterrorism Unit Chief Inspector Arnon Zamora, who was killed while leading the mission):

“[I]t’s a fact that only terrorists captured and interrogated by the Israel Security Agency have provided information on the whereabouts of hostages. No Gazan ‘civilians’ have come forward to do so voluntarily. The argument that they fear Hamas repercussions simply doesn’t cut it anymore, however. Even in Nazi Germany there were citizens who risked their lives to do the conscionable thing. Yad Vashem created a special title for such gentiles—The Righteous Among the Nations—who protected Jews at great peril to themselves.”