“I now understand that their jails are full of honorable people,” one Palestinian says. “Anyone who tries to think for himself winds up there.” He uploaded to social media a video of Hamas police beating a child with Down syndrome and received thousands of supportive messages before being arrested. Others in the series describe the harassment, violence, cruelty, corruption, and even murder of Palestinians by Hamas. A mother shares her refusal to allow Hamas to turn her children into terrorists. “I don’t want my children to be exposed to that indoctrination,” she says. “I want them to think rationally.”
Only 7% of Gazans surveyed say conditions there are positive. Yet those who disagree with Hamas’s message or methods, or simply ask for better living conditions, are labeled “traitors” and “Zionist collaborators.” In other words, there’s no way to tell how many of the Palestinians in the videos depicting the celebration of terrorism are there because they support such attacks and how many are there merely to protect themselves and their families from Hamas.
As soon as the series was released, Hamas attempted to sabotage the films’ distribution platforms. Shortly thereafter, fake versions of the shorts appeared with Hamas-approved narration. (The Hamas-created counterfeits have been flagged as copyright violations and taken off various media platforms.) As CPC president Joseph Braude explained in the Times of Israel:
Their content predictably twists the testimony. For example, in one of our clips, the speaker explains that under Hamas, “it’s forbidden to say we don’t want war,” and change must “come from the people.” In the Hamas version, “The solution is in the Resistance, none other” and “though we’ve endured four wars, we stand with the Resistance and will never ever give them up.” in another clip, “Amna” describes her fear of sending her children to Hamas-run schools “where they indoctrinate people.” The Hamas version has the speaker proudly sending her children to a Hamas school for an upright Islamic education.
