With Hasbara failing, Israel placed Hossam Shabat on a kill list

On October 23 2024, Israel announced that Hossam Shabat was a terrorist alongside six other Palestinian journalists. Hossam predicted they would assassinate him. He survived several attempts on his life. He wrote a brief obituary for himself at the age of 23, carried on reporting, and then on March 24 2025 Israel killed him.

For those of us outside of Gaza, helpless to stop the carnage but unable to look away, a begrudging numbness has set in, a psychic lidocaine to cope with the daily images of the shattered bodies of dead children. The other pro-Palestinian advocates and activists I speak with all mention familiar brain fogs and free-floating agitations.

By this point, I am accustomed to opening my phone and steeling myself for the horrors. But learning of Hossam’s death cut through me like a warm knife.

Through whatever fluke of the internet, many of the friends I have made over the course of the genocide are from the city of Beit Hanoun, like Hossam Shabat.

One was his classmate. Another walked with him through the bombed-out ruins of the North. Looking upon his upturned face, splattered with three stripes of crimson blood, I could not help but imagine each of them lying there in his place.

To quote my dear friend Ibrahim Al-Masri, “Hossam Shabat wasn’t alone. He carried the grief of Beit Hanoun, the cries of children trapped under rubble, the aching voices of mothers queuing for bread, and the gasps of the wounded in hospitals that no longer functioned as hospitals.”

Many will remember the video of 14-year-old aspiring journalist Maisam Al-Masri greeting Hossam Shabat in his car, elated that he had not been killed when the occupation first took the North.

Hossam remained in Northern Gaza throughout the genocide, separated from his family, in full knowledge that staying and working was a death sentence. His reports were an invaluable insight into the occupation’s crimes, and for that they killed him. In death, his eyes remained open, bearing witness one last time.

The Israeli account is, of course, very different. The Israeli army has claimed that Hossam Shabat was a Hamas sniper with the Beit Hanoun Battalion.

It is the kind of paper-thin lie we have grown accustomed to, dutifully repeated by the press. I am no military tactician, but I find it hard to believe that a young man with a high profile who reported his location frequently, including in live broadcasts, would be an effective sniper. In the weeks before he was assassinated, Hossam Shabat was tweeting up to a dozen times a day.

Hasbara killed Hossam Shabat because it’s losing the PR war

A qualitative shift has occurred over the course of the genocide; Israel no longer seems interested in or capable of convincing the rest of the world that its actions are just. Rather, they are preoccupied with producing increasingly flimsy justifications with the sole aim of quelling internal dissent. The Hasbara machine is foundering.

How could it not? For 17 months we have experienced a daily split screen between the endless stream of atrocities committed against the Palestinians and the screeching histrionics of Zionist influencers. While the people of Gaza endure blockade and bombing, Noa Tishby and Michael Rapaport moan about campus demonstrations.

The campus encampments are also the subject of a new documentary, October 8, currently in theatres throughout the US. Originally titled October H8te, the film claims to be a “searing look at the eruption of antisemitism in America that started the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel.”

The trailer is a series of to-camera interviews of the usual suspects, all decrying the lack of support Zionists discovered in the wake of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. They cite social media censorship and foreign interference as reasons for Zionism’s wild unpopularity amongst college students. It never seems to occur to them that it might be Israel’s actions doing the damage.

In a recently shared clip, former Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg, leans into the victim role, fighting through tears that do not come while relaying a story of asking a close friend if she would hide her while the pair were on a walk. Sandberg attributes her friend’s confusion at the question to the woman not being Jewish and not to the fact that it is a frankly absurd thing for a woman worth over two billion dollars to ask.

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The reality is, while Sandberg talks about how unsafe she feels in the US because of the university encampments, the government itself has begun disappearing student protestors on her behalf.

Plainclothes ICE agents are continuing to abduct student activists like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk at the behest of Betar USA, a far-right militant movement founded by Jabotinsky that has been providing the Trump administration with deportation lists.

The violent fantasies that Sandberg argues warrant a global outpouring of sympathy for Zionists are being enacted on an almost daily basis against the very students she claims are a threat.

The hysteria around the encampments has reached a new ludicrous pitch with a lawsuit filed by a group including the families of hostages taken on October 7 against students at Columbia, among them Khalil, whom they allege have been coordinating with Hamas.

The “bombshell” filing includes such evidence as an Instagram post by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine published three minutes before Hamas’ attack that stated, “We are back!!” after the account was dormant for several months.

The reasonable person might note that the inactivity on the account coincided with the Summer holidays. They might point out that it seems unlikely Hamas was coordinating with student groups in the US about an operation that required the element of surprise. They might even question what the American students could provide that would make such a risk worth it.

But Hasbara is no longer concerned with the reasonable person; its sole purpose is securing the flow of weapons. Despite the government announcing earlier this year that they are spending an additional $150 million on “international PR,” Israel seems increasingly uninterested in convincing anyone other than the Western governments that still back them.

While public opinion of Israel plummets, each day the genocide continues without significant repercussions only reinforces that they can ignore this opinion.

This is reflected in the degree to which the goalposts have shifted. First, we were told Israel would never bomb a hospital, then we were shown elaborate schematics of nonexistent subterranean command centres, and now they execute and bury first responders without so much as a shrug. The perverse result of Hasbara falling apart is more brazen, ruthless killing.

While legacy media may still run interference for Israel and universities continue to roll over for the Trump administration, Israel is facing a real threat. It can kill and kill — the number of journalists they have slain far outstrips other major conflicts — but for every Hossam Shabat they kill, there is a Maisam waiting in the wings, ready to shed light on their crimes.

Alex Foley is a researcher and painter living in Brighton, UK. They have a background in molecular biology of health and disease. They are the co-founder of the Accountability Archive, a web tool preserving fragile digital evidence of pro-genocidal rhetoric from power holders.

Follow them on X: @foleywoley

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.