The New Yorker:

Across the Arab world, the group is successfully selling its narrative of resistance.

By David D. Kirkpatrick and Adam Rasgon

As Hamas fighters rampaged through Israeli villages outside Gaza on the morning of October 7th, killing roughly fourteen hundred people, some paused to take videos of themselves with Jewish children at Kibbutz Holit. In one piece of footage, a fighter in an Adidas T-shirt vigorously pats the back of a crying baby who is pressed against his shoulder—the same shoulder carrying his Kalashnikov. Another fighter, wearing a camouflage uniform, bandages the foot of an Israeli boy of toddler age, then puts the boy on his lap while jerking the crying baby back and forth in a stroller. A camera zooms in on the confused face of the boy as an unseen fighter, speaking broken English, instructs him to repeat the Arabic word meaning “in the name of God.” “Say bismillah,” the fighter says. The boy complies, in a soft Hebrew accent.

Hamas released the bismillah video on a Telegram channel six days after the attack. At a moment when the Western news media, and some major Arab outlets, were full of reports about the many civilians who were slaughtered, and Israeli officials were likening Hamas to isis, the footage was apparently Hamas’s rebuttal. At one point in the video, a masked fighter holds up the two children and addresses the camera: “Look at the mercy in our hearts. These kids—we didn’t kill them like you do.” (At least six children died from rocket fire on October 7th, and Israel’s Channel 12 has named at least nineteen others killed by militants.)

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