Release the Gaza tapes, Mr President

Standing beside Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, President Trump declared that he had seen the horrific images of Hamas atrocities — babies butchered, women raped, civilians massacred. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the same. President Biden once did too, before quietly walking it back.

But the question that refuses to die is this: where are these tapes?

Human rights organisations, journalists, and global observers have pressed Israel to release them. Not curated clips shown to diplomats in back rooms. Not brief montages spliced together by the military. But the specific images invoked by leaders to justify their outrage — the ones that supposedly show babies stuffed into ovens, women brutalized, and atrocities so unspeakable they became the pretext for war.

Israel has not released them.

And maybe they won’t. Perhaps they can’t. Maybe they don’t exist.

What has been released

Israel has published footage from 7 October. Bodycams and dashcams show Hamas militants storming communities. The Nova music festival, where more than 260 young people were killed, is captured in terrifying fragments. Video from Sderot and Kibbutz Re’im reveals civilians gunned down, cars riddled with bullets, and homes set ablaze.

These videos are real. They are horrifying. Human Rights Watch has verified some, classifying them as potential war crimes.

But they do not show the most extreme claims repeated from podiums in Washington, London, and Tel Aviv. They do not show babies beheaded or burned alive. They do not show women being raped. They do not confirm the grotesque imagery that leaders fed to the public to sanctify vengeance.

The calculus of concealment

Several explanations present themselves, each more troubling than the last.

The material may be considered too graphic for public consumption. Yet images from Rwanda’s genocide, the massacre at Srebrenica, and the atrocities in Bucha were released because historical truth demanded it. Brutal truths do not become less accurate by remaining hidden.

Israel may fear that such imagery would inflame regional tensions. Yet this concern for restraint sits uneasily alongside the unleashing of unprecedented military force upon Gaza. Perhaps the most disturbing possibility is that battlefield rumors crystallised into accepted “facts,” repeated by officials desperate for moral clarity in an inherently complex conflict. The fog of war has historically transformed speculation into gospel, particularly when that gospel serves immediate political needs.

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There exists, too, the question of narrative control. Israel may understand that releasing specific documentation could redirect international scrutiny toward its own conduct, including questions about whether the Hannibal Directive—the military protocol authorizing the killing of Israeli soldiers rather than allowing their capture—was implemented on 7 October.

Meanwhile, Hamas has released its own propaganda: videos of hostages, including Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel, pleading with Netanyahu to halt military operations. These are manipulative instruments, certainly, but they exist in the public record. The Israeli government has offered no comparable evidence for its most explosive allegations.

The danger of myth

Wars are fought not only with bombs and bullets but with stories. Myths ignite fear, harden resolve, and sanctify violence. They are repeated until they become an unassailable truth.

The story of the Kuwaiti incubator babies helped drag the United States into the Gulf War in 1991. It was a fabrication, orchestrated by a PR firm. The weapons of mass destruction that never existed led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Now, the image of babies stuffed into ovens is being deployed in the service of Israel’s campaign in Gaza. It has justified the flattening of neighborhoods, the killing of thousands of civilians, and the starvation of an entire population.

If it is true, let us see it. If it is false, then it is not a tragedy but a crime — a lie that fuels the machinery of mass slaughter.

A call for truth

Truth is not a weapon to be hoarded. It is not a tool to be deployed only when convenient. It is a moral obligation.

Mr President, you said you saw these tapes. Show us. Prime Minister Netanyahu, you invoked them. Release them.

If the horror is real, the world deserves to see it. If the claims were exaggerated, the world deserves to know that, too.

To refuse is to leave us in the shadows, where myth metastasizes into hatred, where war is sustained by rumor rather than reality. To refuse is to allow propaganda to triumph over truth.

If the world is to take sides, it must do so with eyes wide open, not blindfolded by rhetoric.

The demand is simple, and it is urgent: Release the tapes. 

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.