Hamas waging propaganda war on Israel with shocking videos: Experts
Hamas's determination to use social media propaganda alongside violence, experts say.
Mor Bayder's phone didn't buzz on Saturday morning — her grandmother's routine call to ask if she was awake.
Instead, she discovered her grandmother's «brutal murder» during the Hamas attack on a village bordering the Gaza Strip posted on Facebook, Bayder wrote on the social network.
«A terrorist broke into her home, murdered her, took her phone, photographed the horror and posted it on her Facebook wall.
That's how we found out,» she added.
Speaking to Israeli TV channel Canal 13, a tearful Bayder said the killer had called her aunt to force her to view the images of her grandmother «lying in a pool of blood» in the kibbutz of Nir Oz, just two kilometres from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
Several Israelis from the area have been reported missing.
'Unprecedented at this scale'
Violence is the recurring theme in many other photos and videos spread online by Hamas or its supporters since Saturday.
«This is on purpose: The goal is to trigger a sense of helplessness, paralysis, and humiliation,» said Michael Horowitz, a security analyst at consultancy Le Beck International.
Even the most unbearable images have gone viral, including footage of a woman's partially naked body in the bed of a pick-up truck cheered by armed men.
Her mother has identified her as Shani Louk, a German-Israeli in her twenties who was at a desert rave which turned into a bloodbath early Saturday.
Another widely-shared video shows a family huddled together on the ground.
A boy aged just six or seven asks his mother if his slain sister will come back, and she is forced to answer «no» in a sob — before throwing herself across her son to protect him as the legs of
