The media has buried the hostages, here’s why

Two videos surfaced last week that should have stopped the news cycle cold. They showed two Israeli hostages, Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, kidnapped in October 2023 and held in Gaza by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Both are skeletal. Both are in the final stages of starvation. In one video, David is made to dig his own grave. In another, Braslavski pleads for his life, his body wasted from hunger.

Even Human Rights Watch, which spends most of its energy attacking Israel, admitted the obvious. Hostage-taking is a war crime. Publishing degrading images of captives is also a war crime. Israel says 49 hostages remain in Gaza. Only 20 are believed to be alive. Every one of those is a human being rotting away underground while the world talks about political processes.

This is the kind of footage that should dominate front pages and lead broadcasts. It didn’t. In South Africa, the hostage videos were largely buried, mentioned in passing inside longer pieces about United Nations resolutions; Israeli cabinet meetings; and generic regional updates. The crime itself, on camera, was reduced to a paragraph.

The same media that treated the hostages as an aside has spent the past 10 months giving endless, front-loaded coverage to allegations of starvation in Gaza. Those stories are presented with certainty and moral clarity, repeated across platforms and framed as the central outrage of the war.

The claim that Gaza was starving was rolled out on 9 October 2023, just two days after Hamas’s 7 October massacre, before Israel had launched any ground offensive and before any meaningful siege could even have taken effect. On that day, the organisations Al Haq and Al Mezan posted professionally designed graphics accusing Israel of total warfare and employing starvation as a weapon, tagging fellow activist outfits to ensure rapid amplification. The same Al Haq and Al Mezan stood side by side with the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) and the South African legal team at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) less than three months later in a preplanned, scripted lawfare attack.

It was a script, not a report. It matched word for word the language that would later be used in the ICJ case against Israel. It was timed to launch while the bodies of 7 October were still being identified. The facts on the ground didn’t matter. The accusation was locked in advance, just as Hamas’s attack itself had been planned in advance.

Groups like Al Haq and Al Mezan aren’t independent observers. They are part of the same ideological infrastructure as Hamas, running the political and legal war while Hamas runs the military one. The 9 October statement wasn’t reactive. It was the opening salvo in the lawfare and propaganda offensive that has run in parallel to the rockets and the kidnappings.

This is why the media imbalance isn’t accidental. If your editorial worldview has been shaped by those 9 October talking points, the starvation of hostages by Hamas isn’t just inconvenient, it’s an outright contradiction of the story you have committed to telling. And so it’s downplayed – if mentioned at all.

The footage of David and Braslavski isn’t ambiguous. It’s the visual proof of deliberate, targeted starvation. It’s the moral reality that every starvation headline about Gaza has conveniently ignored. It’s the other half of the story, and the one the South African press refused to tell with anything like the same intensity.

The camera has already done the journalist’s work. It has shown the crime in progress. The failure lies entirely in newsrooms that saw it and chose not to confront it. Forty-nine hostages remain. Twenty may still be alive. The moral duty is to put their names and faces in front of the public every day until they come home. The 9 October starvation narrative was written in advance. The starvation of hostages is unfolding in real time. Which one our media chooses to amplify tells you everything.

• Tim Flack is a seasoned communications professional with a diverse background spanning military service, media, public relations, and safety and security. He is a firearms activist, and owns the Cape Town-based public relations firm Flack Partners PR.