Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He is a Holocaust scholar who has written extensively on the subject. More than half a century ago, Leila Khaled understood something about political violence that has become even more important in the age of social media: the people physically present at an attack are not necessarily its most important audience. In August 1969, Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), participated in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840. The following year she took part in the unsuccessful attempt to hijack El Al Flight 219. Her image - young, attractive, wearing a keffiyeh and holding a rifle - became internationally recognizable and helped make her what The Guardian later called the international “pin-up of armed struggle."[1] But Khaled’s lasting significance is not simply that she became famous. It is that she was unusually candid about what the hijackings were intended to accomplish. Speaking to The Guardian in 2001, she explained: “Until then, the world only dealt with us as refugees. We demonstrated and screamed and shouted to make the world listen, but the only answer we got was more tents and humanitarian aid." The hijackings, she said, were “successful in getting international opinion to ask: who are these people?"[2] That admission is the key to understanding her legacy: the passengers were hostages, the aircraft were instruments, and the real target was the audience. Terrorism Discovers the Camera The PFLP understood the emerging international media environment remarkably early. In September 1970, the organization attempted a spectacular series of airline hijackings. Three seized aircraft were eventually blown up at Dawson’s Field in Jordan after the passengers were removed. The Guardian later described how the PFLP blew up the aircraft “for cameras" while bargaining for the release of imprisoned militants.[3] The political value of the operation depended precisely upon its theatrical character. No territory was captured and no conventional military victory was achieved; what was captured was attention. Khaled herself became part of the message. Her photographs circulated around the world, and her gender, appearance and the juxtaposition of femininity and armed violence helped transform the participant in a civilian-airliner hijacking into an enduring revolutionary image.[4] The violence generated the image, and the image generated the mythology. That communications principle did not disappear when international airline hijacking became more difficult. The methods evolved, but the audience remained. From the PFLP to Hamas The PFLP and Hamas should not be conflated. The PFLP emerged from a secular Marxist-Leninist revolutionary tradition, while Hamas is an Islamist movement rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Their ideologies and organizations are very different. What connects them is not organizational continuity but a strategic insight: a weaker military actor can increase its political power by shaping how a conflict is perceived far beyond the battlefield. In a 2025 study published in The Journal of the Middle East and Africa , Ido Zelkovitz and Yehiel Limor describe Hamas’s media system as a “coordinated propaganda network" operating across traditional and digital platforms in part “to compensate for military weakness." They identify nine distinct target audiences for Hamas communications, one of them explicitly “Western public opinion."[5] That formulation gets to the heart of the matter. What Khaled discovered through hijacking, Hamas later institutionalized: When conventional military power is limited, control of the narrative can compensate for weakness by moving part of the battlefield from the physical target to the international audience. Zelkovitz and Limor describe a sophisticated system spanning television, radio, newspapers, websites and digital platforms. Communications are not merely publicity added after military operations have taken place; they are part of the strategy.[6] A Communications Operation With Budgets and Targets Documents captured by Israel in Gaza and analyzed by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center reportedly include Hamas’s 2022 operational program for its Information Department. Their internal detail is revealing.[7] The program was organized into 25 master-program sections and contained 47 projects and 312 discrete activities, each with objectives, schedules and allocated resources. Thirty-five external projects contained 266 activities, while another 12 organizational projects contained 46. The total planned budget was approximately $2.24 million.[8] Among the principal objectives were strengthening the “Palestinian Arab" narrative for foreign audiences and conducting media and psychological warfare against Hamas’s adversaries. The program reportedly included an English-language news site, campaigns tailored to Western audiences, a weekly English briefing, recruitment of foreign writers and activists and English-language training for Hamas spokesmen.[9] This was not an improvised press office; it was an organized influence operation. The personnel numbers reinforce the point. A 2015 Esquire Middle East profile reported that the broader Al-Aqsa media operation employed about 500 people across television, radio, Shehab News Agency and a prisoner-oriented cable channel.[10] During a severe funding crisis in 2019, Arab News reported that an Al-Aqsa TV employee said roughly 200 television staff had gone without full salaries for more than a year.[11] Those figures should not be read as a simple staffing trend because they refer to different parts of the network at different times. They do, however, demonstrate the scale of the infrastructure. A State Media Monitor profile published in 2026 carried an estimated annual Al-Aqsa TV budget of about $5 million. The estimate was based on consultations with seven local media professionals and experts conducted between December 2023 and April 2024, and the monitor identified no standalone audited 2025-26 budget disclosure. It is therefore an estimate, not a Hamas financial disclosure.[12] Even with that qualification, the comparison with Israel is revealing. At a Knesset State Control Committee hearing in July 2026, Foreign Ministry Director General Eden Bar Tal said that in earlier years the ministry’s worldwide public-diplomacy activity amounted to only NIS 25-27 million annually. Other Israeli ministries and government programs also spent money on public diplomacy, so this was not Israel’s total national expenditure. Nevertheless, the comparison illustrates the differences: Hamas had long treated communications as an operational necesssity, while Israel’s own Foreign Ministry historically devoted relatively modest resources to influencing global opinion.[13] The disparity was not simply financial; it was conceptual. When Civilian Suffering Acquires Strategic Value The media infrastructure becomes more disturbing when considered alongside statements by Hamas leaders about Arab casualties. This point must be made carefully. It is not necessary to claim that every Arab casualty is deliberately engineered, that every photograph is staged, or that the suffering in Gaza is unreal. The suffering is real, and civilians have genuinely been killed, injured and displaced. The more important question is whether Hamas leaders have regarded that suffering as politically useful. There is evidence that they have. In 2008, Hamas legislator Fathi Hammad appeared on Al-Aqsa television and spoke of the Arabs having developed an “industry" of death in which women, the elderly, fighters and children all participated. The United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict later reproduced the statement, calling it “morally repugnant," while cautioning that the statement by itself did not prove that Hamas had forced civilians to shield military objectives in the cases the mission investigated.[14] The qualification matters, but so does the statement. After October 7, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was even more explicit. In an October 26, 2023 address broadcast by Al-Mayadeen and translated by MEMRI, Haniyeh spoke about the blood of Arab women, children and the elderly and declared: “We are the ones who need this blood," saying that it awakened revolutionary spirit and resolve. Haniyeh was speaking from outside Gaza.[15] Yahya Sinwar presents a different case. Unlike members of Hamas’s external leadership, he remained in Gaza throughout the war and ultimately died there. Whatever else may be said about him, he cannot simply be described as a leader who demanded sacrifices while remaining personally insulated from the battlefield. Yet communications attributed to Sinwar reveal the same strategic calculus. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that it had reviewed dozens of messages involving Sinwar, Hamas officials and mediators. According to the Journal, Sinwar believed that prolonged fighting and mounting Palestinian casualties increased international pressure on Israel. In one reported message he said: “We have the Israelis right where we want them." Referring to casualties in earlier wars of national liberation, including Algeria, he reportedly described them as “necessary sacrifices."[16] CNN reported that it had not seen the messages itself and could not independently verify them.[17] Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad separately denied that Sinwar had made the comments, saying, “What has been circulated is completely incorrect."[18] But if the Journal ’s account is accurate, and there is no reason to conclude it is not, Sinwar’s calculation was clear: continued Arab casualties could increase international pressure on Israel and thereby improve Hamas’s strategic position. The Western Multiplier None of this means that Western journalists, students, celebrities or demonstrators are agents of Hamas. They do not have to be. Some people demonstrating for “Palestinian Arabs" are motivated by sincere misguided humanitarian concern. Others understand the conflict through an anti-colonial framework. Still others are drawn to protes because of their visceral hatred of Israel. From the standpoint of communications strategy, the more important issue is the effect. A propaganda campaign reaches its highest level of effectiveness when its message is repeated by people who have no organizational relationship with the people who originally produced it. Hamas does not need a Western student to endorse Hamas; the student may despise Hamas. It needs images from Gaza to produce political conclusions about Israel. It needs those images circulated by journalists, activists and influencers, demonstrations to intensify political pressure, and governments to conclude that the diplomatic cost of allowing Israel to continue military operations has become too high. That is why Zelkovitz and Limor’s identification of “Western public opinion" as a distinct target audience is so important.[19] The international reaction is not incidental to the strategy; it is one of its primary objectives. A Spiral of Cynicism The result is a deeply cynical cycle. Political leaders acquire relevance through resistance, media institutions acquire powerful material to disseminate, foreign activists acquire a cause around which to organize, governments react to public opinion, and international institutions respond to the alleged humanitarian consequences. A sophisticated information operation requires: selection, framing, distribution and repetition. Which images resonate? Who provides the first explanation of an explosion? Which facts are emphasized and which are omitted? Which vocabulary becomes standard in international reporting? Which video dominates social media before competing evidence emerges? The battle is often not over whether an event occurred, but over what the event will mean to an audience thousands of miles away. Khaled’s Real Legacy This returns us to Leila Khaled. Her hijackings belong to another technological age. There was no X, Telegram, TikTok or Instagram. Television networks were few and news traveled slowly. That made an international passenger aircraft extraordinarily valuable: it gathered citizens of multiple countries in one place, crossed borders, involved governments, terrified travelers and, above all, guaranteed cameras. Khaled understood what those cameras could accomplish. Before the hijackings, she said, the world saw “Palestinian Arabs" principally as refugees needing tents and humanitarian assistance. The hijackings forced the international audience to ask who the Palestinian Arabs were and what they wanted.[20] Half a century later, the machinery is immeasurably more sophisticated. The hijacked aircraft has been replaced by the smartphone, the revolutionary poster by the social-media feed, and the press conference by the viral clip. But the underlying strategic insight remains recognizable: the event occurs in the Middle East, while a critical audience is somewhere else. Leila Khaled demonstrated that spectacular violence could manufacture political visibility. Hamas later built an institutional communications infrastructure that, according to academic researchers, explicitly sought to “compensate for military weakness" and targeted Western public opinion as a distinct audience.[21] Hamas leaders have themselves spoken about “Palestinian Arab" blood and sacrifice in revolutionary and strategic terms.[22][23][24] The most important question, therefore, is not whether every photograph from Gaza is authentic or whether every Western protester understands Hamas. It is more fundamental: who benefits when “Palestinian Arab" suffering becomes politically valuable? For the leadership directing the struggle, international attention can generate leverage, legitimacy, and political survival. For Western participants, misdirected moral outrage shields Hamas from accountability for its massacres and its cruel and inhuman treatment of both the hostages and its own people. Endnotes [1] Katharine Viner, “‘I made the ring from a bullet and the pin of a hand grenade,’" The Guardian , January 25, 2001 (page dated Jan. 26 in the URL). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/jan/26/israel [2] Seumas Milne, “Hijacker back in Britain on campaign trail," The Guardian, January 24, 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jan/25/israel [3] Milne, “Hijacker back in Britain on campaign trail." [4] Viner, “‘I made the ring from a bullet and the pin of a hand grenade.’" [5] Ido Zelkovitz and Yehiel Limor, “‘The Word Must Precede the Bullet’: Words as Ammunition - Hamas’s Media Artillery," The Journal of the Middle East and Africa 16, no. 4 (2025): 295-312. https://doi.org/10.1080/21520844.2025.2563433 [6] Zelkovitz and Limor, “‘The Word Must Precede the Bullet.’" [7] Avishai Karo, “Hamas Media as Reflected in Documents Brought Back from the Gaza Strip," Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, February 2026. https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/hamas-media-as-reflected-in-documents-brought-back-from-the-gaza-strip/ [8] Karo, “Hamas Media as Reflected in Documents Brought Back from the Gaza Strip." [9] Ibid. [10] “Al-Aqsa: Palestine’s defiant TV channel," Esquire Middle East . https://www.esquireme.com/culture/features/al-aqsa-tv [11] Hazem Balousha, “Hamas media facing financial meltdown," Arab News , February 20, 2019. https://www.arabnews.com/node/1455471/amp [12] “Al-Ribat Communications and Artistic Productions / Al-Aqsa TV," State Media Monitor, June 2026. https://statemediamonitor.com/2026/06/al-aqsa-tv/ [13] Knesset State Control Committee, “State Control Committee discusses activity of National Public Diplomacy Directorate," Knesset press release, July 2026. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/News/PressReleases/Pages/press13726w.aspx [14] United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, A/HRC/12/48, September 25, 2009, paras. 477-478. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/666096/ [15] “Hamas leader: We need the blood of women, children and the elderly of Gaza," JNS, October 29, 2023, reproducing a MEMRI translation of Ismail Haniyeh’s October 26, 2023 address on Al-Mayadeen. https://www.jns.org/israel-news/hamas-leader-we-need-the-blood-of-women-children-and-the-elderly-of-gaza [16] Summer Said and Rory Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas," The Wall Street Journal , June 10, 2024. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-chiefs-brutal-calculation-civilian-bloodshed-will-help-hamas-626720e7 [17] CNN, June 12, 2024, reporting that it had not seen the messages and could not independently verify them. https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnr/date/2024-06-12/segment/19 [18] “Hamas denies that Sinwar called Gaza death toll ‘necessary sacrifice,’" The New Arab, June 12, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/news/hamas-denies-sinwar-called-gaza-death-toll-necessary-sacrifice [19] Zelkovitz and Limor, “‘The Word Must Precede the Bullet.’" [20] Milne, “Hijacker back in Britain on campaign trail." [21] Zelkovitz and Limor, “‘The Word Must Precede the Bullet.’" [22] United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, paras. 477-478. [23] “Hamas leader: We need the blood of women, children and the elderly of Gaza," JNS. [24] Said and Jones, “Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas."
