Hamas spins the liberal media in a bid to outwit Trump
An interview in “The New York Times” speaking of “regret” for the Oct. 7 fallout is an information operation aimed at legitimizing and continuing their rule in the Gaza Strip.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
Feb 26, 2025
Give Hamas credit for understanding the American and European audiences they wish to influence and deceive. The Islamist group may have started a disastrous war with Israel that led to horrendous suffering for the majority of Palestinian Arabs. But they also recognize that part of what they need to do to survive and hold onto power in Gaza is to convince the West that they are reasonable people and not the genocidal terrorists who seek death and destruction.
The latest example of this strategy came this week when Mousa Abu Marzouk gave an exclusive interview to The New York Times. Billed as “the Qatar-based head of Hamas foreign relations office,” he claimed that he would not have supported the multipronged assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, had he known of the consequences for Gaza.
As he told the Times, Abu Marzouk was not privy to plans for the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction that the Palestinians unleashed on 23 Israeli communities. The Hamas leadership, which lives in great luxury—largely paid for by the billions in aid donations that Gaza has received from Western countries, as well as from the group’s criminal activities—wasn’t really in control of the “military” leadership of Gaza. It was that bifurcated sector, he said, that ruled the area with an iron fist from 2007 to 2023, when it was an independent Palestinian state in all but name.
Lying about Oct. 7
Of course, Abu Marzouk and the rest of the top echelon of Hamas, who have been kept safe by security guarantees provided by the government of Qatar that funds terrorism while also pretending to be an ally of the United States, approved the idea of Oct. 7 in concept. But using the Times as an outlet with which it hopes to reach liberal Americans and the international community, the Palestinian Arab terrorist group now thinks it would be in their best interests to pretend to have some remorse about how things worked out.
That didn’t manifest itself in any contrition for the barbaric crimes committed by Palestinians on Oct. 7 or in the subsequent 16 months of war, during which they’ve tortured and murdered hostages, and have continued to fire rockets and missiles into Israel. Nor was it an admission of guilt for having placed their armed formations, rocket launchers and command centers in, around and under hospitals, schools and civilian dwellings to maximize the suffering of Gazans.
Instead, the Times reports that Abu Marzouk merely told them that the extent of the destruction and casualties resulting from their war was more than they had calculated, and thus wound up on the negative end of some theoretical cost-benefit analysis. “If it was expected that what happened would happen, there wouldn’t have been Oct. 7,” the Times quoted Abu Marzouk as saying.
In typical fashion, Hamas officially disavowed the interview and reaffirmed that they have no regrets about Oct. 7 or any wiggle room about giving up their arms. This is very much like the way Palestinian leaders have for decades spoken in one way in English to Western and Israeli journalists, and in a very different way in Arabic to their own people. Still, Abu Marzouk’s statement was significant—if only in the way it indicated that they are interested in tweaking their image and fooling an always gullible Western media when it comes to the Palestinians and generally hostile when it covers Israelis.
Even taken at face value, the sort of halfway regret Abu Marzouk deployed doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for a number of reasons. Perhaps more interesting was his statement that Hamas was prepared to negotiate “the future of the group’s weapons in Gaza,” which the newspaper helpfully pointed out was a “sticking point in negotiations with Israel.”
Is Witkoff the weak link?
In doing so, Abu Marzouk wasn’t so much playing with the hopes of the overwhelmingly left-wing readers of the Times as he was with those of Steve Witkoff, the special envoy to the Middle East tapped by President Donald Trump.
Witkoff was the prime mover who pushed the ceasefire/hostage release deal over the goal line in January. In doing so, he accepted the appalling terms that had been embraced by the lame-duck Biden administration that, along with winning the freedom of some of the hostages, also ordered Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Hopes for Hamas’s disarming or disbanding notwithstanding, this guarantees that the terrorists will hold onto power.
That gave Hamas enormous leverage over Israel. It exploited that with its despicable and abusive hostage-release ceremonies. These travesties are aimed at demonstrating that the terror group remains in control and is not going anywhere, regardless of the statements about Gaza’s future coming out of Jerusalem and Washington. And that includes Trump’s plans for resettling the Palestinians and turning the coastal enclave into a Middle Eastern resort.
Palestinian demonstrations of the death cult that passes as their political culture have outraged the White House, as well as Israelis and Jews worldwide. But given that Netanyahu feels that he has no choice but to continue with the ceasefire to ransom the 30 or so hostages presumed to be still alive, they are, as of now, not paying a price for it.
Yet the Palestinians, who reportedly have agreed to release the next four bodies of dead hostages this week without such ceremonies, also know that the key to their future is toning down the images of violence.
It’s a game that Palestinian terror organizations and their political frontmen have played off and on for decades, sometimes posing as thoughtful moderates and, at other times, exhibiting their actual beliefs and goals. It’s always an absurd and utterly disingenuous show. It has worked well enough, however, to convince most of the supposedly smart people at outlets like the Times and other establishment institutions, in addition to the supposedly highbrow students on American college campuses. In this way, many of those who comment on and work in foreign policy have been persuaded to support policies that often wittingly or unwittingly bolster the Palestinian goal of Israel’s destruction.
The question is whether it will work on Witkoff, who has retained Trump’s confidence even though the president’s statements on the Palestinians have been completely at odds with the terms of the deal, for which his team deserves a great deal of the blame.
The business connections between Witkoff—who, like Trump, is another New York real estate billionaire—and the corrupt and Hamas-supporting Qatari government are no secret. Whether he will prove, as he seemed during the ceasefire negotiations, to be the weak link in an administration whose other senior foreign-policy team members have tough and realistic views about the Palestinians, as well as the Arab and Muslim worlds, is yet to be determined.
Targeting the media
What we may be witnessing is a Hamas information operation in which the Western media will play a featured role. We can expect that their leadership will pretend to be willing to coexist, however reluctantly, with Israel while only biding their time until they can be resupplied and rearmed to the point where their campaign of “resistance” against the existence of the Jewish state and its people, will resume.
We don’t need to waste much time unpacking Abu Marzouk’s supposed moderation.
No one in Hamas can credibly pretend to be surprised by the blowback from the massacre of 1,200 men, women and children on Oct. 7.
It’s true that they were convinced that the efforts of the Israeli left to oppose the Netanyahu government’s plans for a much-need judicial reform initiative meant that the Jewish state was weak and divided to the point where, as some on the left avowed, they would not serve in the military. Perhaps Hamas also thought their cross-border offensive would be so successful and reach so far into Israel that it wouldn’t mean much fighting in Gaza.
Since the whole point of the deployment of their facilities and forces around human shields to increase the number of noncombatants killed, any claim that they didn’t know what a full-scale war would mean for their people is a sick joke.
Nor is there the slightest chance that they would ever willingly give up their guns or power in Gaza. If that is to happen—both the Israeli and American governments correctly believe that is necessary—then that will come by a decisive use of force that the Biden administration forbade Israel from using, not through talks and hand-holding with terrorist leaders in Qatar.
On the contrary, Hamas plans on parlaying its “success” in slaughtering Jews and continuing to fight them into quite realistic hopes to take control in Judea and Samaria. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas rightly fears them and that is why he has avoided elections for two decades.
Shape-shifting terrorist
Abu Marzouk is himself an interesting example of the way even the most extreme groups such as the genocidal Islamists of Hamas like to shape-shift and manipulate Americans.
He came to the United States on a student visa when he was 31. He subsequently obtained a green card and lived in the country for 14 years. While there, he led Hamas’s fundraising efforts and even engaged at times with the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, seeking their recognition.
His American sojourn ended when he was arrested for connections to terrorism as its de facto foreign minister and his links to bombings in Israel. At the time, his lawyer, Stanley Cohen, claimed that he was a pro-Palestinian activist and not a leader of Hamas. Eventually, he was deported to Jordan, rather than extradited to Israel as he should have been.
Since then, his involvement in terrorism isn’t really in dispute. But in a demonstration of the Times’ lack of credibility, it quoted Cohen, whom it disingenuously described only as the terrorist’s “friend” in its article about their recent interview with Abu Marzouk. According to Cohen, his former client was “not a nihilist. He would not support any action that he believed would bring unprecedented, wholesale retaliation by anyone on the people.”
What Abu Marzouk says or the way he is described in the Times doesn’t matter. What is of importance is how Hamas seems to be laser-focused on manipulating the West into accepting their continued existence.
Resisting this spin is of vital importance for the Trump administration. Whether or not Trump’s scheme for Gaza is realized, Washington needs to treat the defeat, disarming and eradication of Hamas as non-negotiable. The same applies to Israel, though it probably won’t be possible for Netanyahu to resume efforts toward that goal while a chance to free more living hostages exists.
Over and above the policy implications of the possible success of Hamas’s information operation, the way it is being assisted by legacy media must not be overlooked. The moral bankruptcy—indeed, the irrelevance of the left’s leading print, broadcast and cable-TV news outlets—has been key to understanding why Trump was elected and support for him since resuming office in January. The eagerness of the liberal press to be used by Hamas to facilitate a monstrous terror organization’s continued hold on power is one more reason to condemn their bias and ignore their propaganda.
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