October 7: the visual fate of the hostages

The images of the crimes committed on October 7 provoked not only understandable shock, but also much debate: was it necessary to show the horror that Hamas terrorists sought to film and broadcast? Emmanuel Taïeb examines the fate of these images and the political uses to which they have been put, highlighting their reversibility and the risk of making them invisible.

 

 

Every armed conflict is ritually accompanied by the circulation of images of violence and a debate about how much of it should be shown to the public. In the field, photojournalists are keen to cover the event, while bearing in mind that their images could one day be used as evidence in an international trial, giving them a certain nobility and putative historical importance. On the editorial side, the tendency is rather to make violence invisible, to avoid any accusation of voyeurism, except when it comes to denouncing and documenting crimes against civilians, again with an evidential perspective. For example, during the Ukrainian conflict, images of corpses found in Boutcha in March 2022 were shown head-on in the general press. Quite exceptionally, the New York Times featured a photograph by veteran American photojournalist Lynsey Addario on the front page of its March 7, 2022 issue, showing the bodies of a Ukrainian family killed by a Russian strike as they tried to leave Irpine by train. Here, the media’s desire to bear witness to attacks on civilians pushes back the usual limits of what can be shown. Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to advise against exposure to images of violence, in order to avoid further trauma or trivialization.

Beyond these professional issues, there is an impressive and recurrent arsenal of arguments that most often justify hiding images of violence from the public: refusing to indulge in sadism, avoiding relaying foreign propaganda, omitting images deemed to be uninformative, complying with current legislation which, in France, drastically regulates this type of image, respecting the dignity of the victims, and above all avoiding the emergence of unpleasant emotions for the viewer (shock, terror, disgust, anger). The videos and photos we can see are in fact all of “survivors”, who have passed the forks of media and emotional self-censorship. More subterraneanly, the idea of the “unrepresentable” of extreme violence, which Claude Lanzmann theorized on the basis of the absence of images of the Shoah’s own exterminating enterprise, seems to have extended to all forms of violence, even when images are available.

The images of October 7, the date of the Hamas attack on Israel, are no exception to the rule. Between the 40-minute montage shown to French parliamentarians and journalists by the Israeli government, and the testimonies of survivors and rescue workers on the atrocities committed that day, which were not photographed, there is an “invisible continent” of images of this event that makes the intensity of its violence even more difficult to imagine. One of the first rescue workers to arrive at the site of the Tribe of Nova rave party, overwhelmed by what he saw, said he had taken photos of the bodies of tortured women, then erased the hardest ones to avoid uncontrolled media use. In retrospect, he can’t forgive himself for having “lost evidence”. No doubt he had also not envisaged that the reality and scale of the massacre would so quickly be challenged by some supporters of the Palestinian cause. As a result, many of the crimes committed on October 7 will never be documented, and there is a striking discrepancy between the descriptions of atrocities given by witnesses (mutilated, dislocated and charred bodies, corpses of naked women with fractured pelvises, children killed in the kibbutz) and the absence of any visual representation of them.

Hamas equipped its members with cameras to literally “ direct ” the massacre and then broadcast it worldwide, relying on the media and social networks.

However, the event was accompanied by a procession of images taken largely by the Hamas militiamen themselves, who wanted to document their action and demonstrate its effectiveness, as al-Qaeda and Daesh had long been doing with their attacks and summary executions. This gesture is part of both a propagandistic logic, to signify their mastery of territories and bodies, and a logic of terror towards local populations and the West, whom these organizations address by filming torture and assassinations in high definition, relying on a dedicated studio, the Al-Hayat Media Center, and apeying Hollywood productions, non-fictional here, in a desire to give everything to be seen and to “see in detail”. As historian Tal Bruttmann explains, Hamas equipped its members with cameras to literally “direct” the massacre and then broadcast it worldwide, relying on the media and social networks. Death is no longer inflicted in secret, in faraway places out of sight; it is claimed with pride and filmed for maximum publicity. But, against the initial intentions of the photographers, who document their “trophies”, it is possible to confront the violence of these images.

Images of kidnappings

Of the 240 kidnappings carried out – including 35 children – several videos in particular were shown on the day itself and in the days that followed.

Among the films shown was the capture of Noa Argamani^[1] and her companion, the loading into a jeep of Naama Levy^[2], and the exhibition of the naked body of Shani Louk^[3], about which I have already written. Other videos show a repetition of the same modus operandi, with elderly women taken away on motorcycles, or the images of Evyatar David, a 22-year-old festival-goer, thrown into the back of a pick-up truck apparently containing other Israelis, handcuffed, shirtless, beaten with rifle butts, then filmed on his arrival in Gaza, where a hooded and armed militiaman holds him under his arm to escort him.

Among the various phases of the Hamas attack, without it being clear what was prepared and what was improvised, one consists in killing civilian and military targets (274 soldiers are among the 1,200 victims, some 20 are still in captivity and excluded from negotiations) and another in violently transferring people to Gaza with the possibility of their imminent death. The filming of these kidnappings has been central to Hamas’ communication, whereas the killings themselves have not been broadcast (if they have been filmed at all), while in comparison Mexican gangs, for example, do not film the kidnappings, but rather the killing and display of the bodies. In all three videos, the captives are tied up and placed in vehicles which then drive off towards Gaza, leaving the camera on a fixed point, and taking the hostages to a place of detention that is difficult to fathom. The image of the jeeps and pickups driving away functions as a metonymy for the fate of the hostages, torn from their homeland and plunged into the absolute power of foreign individuals. Later, images of cars being triumphantly welcomed into Gaza, and information about hostages being held in tunnels or even in their captors’ homes (for example, in the account given by Mia Schem, freed on November 30, 2023).

These are images depicting the control of bodies, particularly female bodies. On May 23, 2024, the families of several hostages broadcast a Hamas video, with its most violent passages edited out, showing Naama Levy and four other hostage girls, shackled and wounded (one unconscious on the ground, two others mute), then loaded into a truck by armed men. In this large white room where more than a dozen men are busy, then praying, the initial political dimension of the action – destabilizing the Israeli state, demonstrating the armed strength of Hamas, undermining the Abraham Accords, putting the Palestinian question back on the agenda – fades in favor of reducing the women to their “naked life”, as Giorgio Agamben calls it in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, i.e. a life doomed to death, and stripping the subjects of all their rights. One of the militiamen even threatens to kill them. For the men of Hamas, these hostages are not simply prisoners of war, but women whose bodies are now at their disposal. “There are girls here who can get pregnant”, says one of them, before staring at one of them and saying ‘You’re too beautiful’. The rapes have undoubtedly already taken place, but here they are announced as the very program of detention, and as a claimed and assumed weapon of war.

Noa Argamani is separated from her partner, Avinatan, and placed on a motorcycle between two men. An analysis by NBC suggested that she had not been kidnapped by fighters, but by Gazans who had followed the Hamas breakthrough. A video later showed Noa Argamani sitting on the sofa of an ordinary apartment, and she was finally released by Israeli army special forces in early June, without her companion.

The virality of the October 7 images makes them suitable for denunciation, mobilization and “reenactment”, that is, the recreation of the image as a political weapon.

In the back of an open pickup, Shani Louk’s body is crushed by screaming gunmen. On the side of the vehicle, a man spits on her bloody head, then the vehicle drives away too. While Shani Louk is virtually naked, Naama Levy – pulled from the trunk of a 4×4 by a man carrying a gun, shouting “Allah Akbar”, and moved to the back of the vehicle – is in jogging bottoms, barefoot, with injuries to her hands, arms and feet. Above all, her crotch is bloodied, a sign that she has been raped, and that Hamas members are therefore allowing images to be shown that could be used against them, in the name of the “victory” that this capture represents. The film showing Naama Levy functions differently from those of the kidnappings, as it is set at the point of arrival, Gaza, and leaves out of view the time that precedes it, that of the sexual violence and beatings from which she bears the scars. Viewed at the same time, these videos can in fact form a complete sequence: capture, rape and captivity in Gaza. To this sequence should be added the earlier images of these three women that resurface, either family photos or those posted on the Internet, and which, when edited together, speak of their tragic visual destiny.

Images so contrasting that they should never meet. On social networks, for example, Shani Louk’s dramatic fate is reconstructed in a “watch to the end” mode, showing her first smiling and mutinous, then lying flat on her stomach in the trunk of a pickup truck. The editing here seeks out the stopper of consciousness, for nothing logically connects Shani Louk’s chosen life and inflicted death. The same before-and-after logic is used in the Daily Mail of January 8, 2024, a widely circulated British tabloid, which published photos, taken from a Hamas video, of the young hostage girls, their faces bloodied and flabbergasted, set against their portraits from the time before, to show what captivity physically produces and draw attention to their fate. As far as we know, this montage has had no equivalent in the French media, only in the form of posters on walls. This traditional practice of supporting hostages by displaying their portraits, here via private initiatives, has also been the target of a popular anti-Zionist iconoclasm that has torn these images down all over Paris; without this phenomenon being particularly questioned.

The trace of blood that reddens Naama Levy’s white pants is the focal point of our gaze, crystallizing the horror of this day of violence, when armed men took very young girls prisoner. In this context, the more Hamas militiamen sexualize their hostages, the more they depoliticize their actions. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is foreign to civilian women’s bodies, and only enters them through violence. If politicization is an increase in the generality of action, or the appeal to a third party to resolve a conflict, the violence exercised against women behind closed doors embodies the moment when this conflict is least political, and thus belongs to another order, between cruelty and abuse, the practice of which exists in other places.

Reversibility of images

Where Hamas intended to capture women in total indistinction, its own images have enabled them to be identified and named. Noa Argamani was perfectly recognized by those close to her, because the video, filmed at close range, showed her head-on. Similarly, Shani Louk’s mother recognized her by the tattoos on her legs. As trophies, these images immediately made the rounds on social networks, ignoring the usual reservations about the dignity of the victims, to report their abduction, call for mobilization, and recall their lives and their memory. The point is to oppose indistinction with individual identities; not simply women targeted as “Jewish” or “Israeli”, but people who have had singular journeys up to that point.

Against the initial intentions of the photographers, who document their “trophies”, it is possible to confront the violence of these images.

These images of frontal violence are used politically, to put pressure on the Israeli government, to denounce – with unexpected difficulty – violence against women, and once again to denounce the consequences for civilians of a conflict that goes beyond them. The image of Naama Levy’s bloody crotch thus became iconic and part of popular visual culture: in Sao Paulo on November 30, in London on January 26 and in Paris on March 8 (against the backdrop of the fracturing of the French feminist movement), during demonstrations for the release of hostages and against sexual violence, demonstrators wore the same stained jogging suits as Naama Levy, even going so far as to adopt her postures, hands handcuffed and body held by a jailer. The virality of the October 7 images makes them appropriable both for denunciation and mobilization, and for “ reenactment ”, that is, the re-creation of the image as a political weapon, in a more pacified context, as if it were necessary to make the initial video last, to re-create dozens of figures of Naama Levy from the day of her capture, to express her distress and publicly show what she has suffered, in front of those who may not have seen the images or would contest them. Re-appropriation in fact enables Hamas to wrest its own images, to appropriate them, to control them, to multiply them in other places, and to transform them into an element in the repertoire of collective protest and emotion. This kind of reappropriation is part of the same dynamic as the use of the red garments of the maids in the dystopian series The Handsmaid’s Tale in demonstrations for the free disposal of women’s bodies, or the gesture of an anonymous artist who lay down in the streets of Moscow in the position of one of the bodies photographed in Boutcha, hands tied behind his back. Here too, it’s a question of using happening and performance to resist denial and iconoclasm.

Hamas’s propagandistic attempt did not reach the West unfiltered, and spectators were able to turn the images they saw on their head. Typically, these images were an immediate vindication of the action, a filmed signature, open-faced and unmediated, closing the door on any challenge to their authors. Their reversibility operates in all fields: where Hamas portrays the warlike prowess of its men, we see women disarmed and mistreated, in a striking gendered contrast; where Hamas seeks a dazzling action, we see an act essentially aimed at civilians and as such falling under terrorism, or even heinous crime; where Hamas intends to uniformly provoke fear, it also provokes anger, grief, consternation, empathy, and a hatred on the Israeli side that fans the flames of retaliation.

Abduction of Naama, Liri, Agam, Karina, by Elisabetta FruchtEverything is contrast in these videos: contrast of postures and sounds between agitating and screaming militiamen, raising their weapons, and victims terrorized or, like the motionless Shani Louk, probably already dead. As at the Bataclan, the contrast between a carefree rave party and the eruption of violence that ends in bloodshed. Contrast between the space of the party and that of war, symbolized here by machine guns and jeeps. Contrast between the photographs of the young women before their abduction, showing them “in their day”, among friends, posing for social networks, and their improbable kidnapping, which wasn’t a common mode of action on the Palestinian side until that point and had only concerned a small number of individuals (think of the soldier Gilad Shalit, abducted in 2006 and freed in 2011 in exchange for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners). In fact, all these contrasts reiterate the initial disconnect between universes that “shouldn’t” have met and that terrorism has brought together: that of armed violence and that of civilians.

The reversibility of images also affects the Israelis, who have broadcast videos of Palestinian prisoners stripped naked – no doubt to make sure they weren’t carrying explosives or weapons – which have been seen in the West as proof of mistreatment and humiliation, but also images of soldiers posing inappropriately in Gazan apartments or rejoicing in their action. The latter images easily fit into the usual media framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which since the first Intifada has seen the denunciation of Israeli brutality and the delegitimization of its actions. On the contrary, the images of October 7 had a striking effect from the outset, because they escaped this framing and did not fit into the “grand narrative” of the weak opposing the strong in an asymmetrical conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Hence the desire in pro-Palestinian circles to erase this day and these images, and to deny the violence, particularly the rape of women. Until then, Israeli civilians had been killed in attacks which, with a few exceptions, such as the one at the Dolphinarium discotheque in 2001 (21 dead), were rather downplayed in Europe and included in the litany of regional violence. The unprecedented scale of the October 7 attacks, the way they were carried out (people killed in their own apartments, kidnappings, face-to-face confrontations lasting several hours between Hamas militiamen and victims), and the deliberate choice to target civilians as well, turned the conventional media treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on its head.

The October 7 images had a striking effect from the outset, as they did not fit into the “grand narrative” of the weak opposing the strong in an asymmetrical conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

The fact that these videos were broadcast so long after the fact raises the question of their possible invisibility on October 7. TV channels, for example, broadcast short segments of the abductions, but did they have longer films? This brings us back to the question of the pragmatics of the visibility of this conflict, on which Daniel Dayan has worked at length, positing that the display or invisibilization of certain images is a matter of “doing”, i.e., an implicit and often politicized journalistic choice. The visibility of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 1967, which crystallized with the Intifadas, is based on “verdictive statements”, in the sense of J. L. Austin, which require viewers to point the finger and choose the “right side”. These ideological statements are divisive, making Israel and Zionism the indisputable culprits. In the case of the October 7 attack, victim-blaming is also in full play, with violence said to be provoked by those who suffer it, and terrorism ultimately justified. Images of suffering Israelis therefore did not fit into the doxic media framework, and instead of seeing them as terrifying images of violence against civilians and women, they functioned for many in the West as a signal that it was once again possible to attack Jews. This is the most unexpected reversibility of images, where localized violence authorizes globalized violence, and provides a historic opportunity to put an end to the State of Israel and its supposed supporters.

Showing violence

Since its birth at the end of the 19^th century, photography has been interested in war (the Crimean and American Civil Wars), and today the agents of violence document it themselves. However, looking at violence remains a delicate matter, surrounded by caution and taboos, sensitivities and censorship, national traditions and media traditions. With each conflict, the question of how to show violence, victims and corpses arises anew, as if it were impossible to invent a clear jurisprudence on visibility. The point of discussion is not only the tension between what should be shown and what should be hidden, or between images reflecting the viewpoint of the executioners and those of the victims, but also the fact that nothing is a priori unrepresentable, and that if images exist, they are important sources for the public, journalists and academics. Images of violence are no less informative than other images, nor are they of a nature that would call for their invisibilization. The rejection of images of violence is in fact a rejection of the violence of the world, which risks derealizing it and rendering us incapable of understanding why it makes sense to those who use it. “It’s the image of reality itself that’s under suspicion. What it shows is judged to be too real, too intolerably real to be proposed in the mode of the image”, writes Jacques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator. Dismissing the image is tantamount to dismissing an unbearable reality. Either because it’s deemed too violent, or because it’s politically preferable to sweep it under the carpet and erase all traces of it, only to start denying that it ever happened, without the images, now rendered invisible, being opposable. Add to this the constant suspicion that images are inherently deceptive, whereas text and voice are always authentic. The photo disturbs the accompanying text or commentary, competing with it, weakening it if its content is striking, and the worry is that the “shock of photos” will outweigh the “weight of words”. In fact, this famous slogan has often been confirmed when a photo that has become iconic has erased the surrounding article: there is indeed a “weight of photos” and a deposit in visual memory.

The rejection of images of violence is in fact a rejection of the violence of the world, which risks derealizing it and rendering us incapable of understanding why it makes sense to those who use it.

On the contrary, we need to counter the principle that violence is unrepresentable with the need to show it, to analyze it, to capture what may have escaped the viewers, not to leave it to fiction alone to deal with violence, not to censor a visual truth, to work with these representations as historiographical sources and as a way of visualizing the unimaginable and unthinkable, as Georges Didi-Huberman does with the four images snatched from Auschwitz by members of a Sonderkommando.

The pending question then becomes what business we can have with these images and how we can study them, overcoming our prejudices, our sensitivities of the moment, without leaving them to the historians of the future alone^[4]. We must be as contemporary with the images of the event as we are with the event itself. Here, they are an entry point into the unprecedented recent rupture marked by October 7, which, after 80 years of post-Shoah educational work in Europe, once again sends Jews back to their “naked lives”, unprotected (by their own state, in this case), without rights, men and women expendable without guilt.

Confronting these images means accessing a range of emotions other than terror, notably compassion; it means provoking behavior, revolt or even commitment in the face of violence against civilians, accessing information, deconstructing propaganda, documenting a situation, or even identifying murderers for possible legal action. If terrorism transforms civilians into suspended dead, the visual destiny of these women tragically illustrates that images, even those taken by their executioners, are the only way to make them visible.

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Emmanuel Taïeb