Key Takeaways:
- CNN repeatedly presents Israeli military action as the cause of hostage deaths, even as Hamas was responsible.
- The IDF’s successful efforts to rescue living hostages and recover the bodies of those who died are largely relegated to the margins.
- By shifting the focus from those who took the hostages to those who tried to rescue them, CNN reinforces a narrative that sidelines Hamas’ responsibility for the hostage crisis.
Within days of Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, the IDF’s mission was twofold: bring all the hostages home and root out Hamas from Gaza. The task, given the vast terrorist infrastructure embedded in the Gaza Strip, was undoubtedly a difficult one, but nonetheless one of vital importance.
It is thus not only misleading, but deceptive to present the IDF as having acted recklessly, as done in CNN’s “Netanyahu says he brought all the October 7 hostages home. These are the stories of those who didn’t come back alive.”
CNN sets this tone in the lede, where the reason the IDF was operating in Gaza at all, Hamas’ abduction of 251 people on October 7, is relegated to a subordinate clause. Instead, it presents the unfortunate death of Bedouin-Israeli hostages, Youssef and Hamza Ziyadne, as the result of an Israeli airstrike in Rafah based on anonymous sources. Meanwhile, the IDF had previously reported they were killed in captivity, yet, in CNN’s framing, the attribution to Hamas’ responsibility is nowhere to be seen.
Case after case that CNN highlights follows this very template, whereby the IDF becomes the perpetrator for having worked to save its own civilians during a war it did not start. The author’s choice to organize the article’s narrative around hostages who “didn’t come back alive” is presented through the lens of what Israel did or failed to do, while the agency of the terrorist organizations that abducted them is consistently pushed into the background. Yet these people were not casualties of an abstract military conflict. They were kidnapped by Hamas, taken into Gaza and held captive inside an environment deliberately structured around Hamas’ military infrastructure, which was notably embedded in civilian locations.
Hamas’ responsibility is also considerably watered down. CNN writes that 16 hostages were confirmed to have been killed directly by their captors. It then identifies another 11 who were killed by Israeli strikes or operations. But the article goes further, attributing a total of 24 hostage deaths to Israeli military activity – even when the cause of death was unconfirmed, or when Hamas murdered them, as with the Beautiful Six.
But Hamas did not rely only on the excuse of the approaching Israeli military to murder hostages. Survivors of Hamas captivity were repeatedly threatened with murder, while others, including a mother with her baby and toddler, were murdered in captivity.
The eight hostages who were rescued alive in daring missions by the IDF are hardly given any space – relegated to one short line in parentheses, seemingly an afterthought in such a lengthy article.
The 52 bodies of hostages recovered by the IDF during operations in Gaza, with the last one being recovered in January 2026, are also hardly acknowledged. Yet these rescues are among the clearest evidence that Israel’s military was actively pursuing its stated mission of bringing hostages home.
CNN is not the first paper to diminish the IDF’s attempts to rescue all hostages from Gaza. Throughout the war, this framing was all too apparent.
Publishing this story on October 8, 2026, in the anniversary week of the October 7 massacre, is not an editing error, but a choice. It distorts the story of the hostage crisis by placing Israel’s actions at the center of the tragedy while minimizing the terrorist organizations that abducted, held, and murdered the hostages.
Every hostage who did not come out of Gaza alive was a tragedy. But tragedy does not prove recklessness. The hostages were taken by Hamas, held by Hamas, and in too many cases murdered by Hamas – and that should have been CNN’s focus.
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
