Hamas ‘forced hostage to film fake video of her death’

In a cruel display of Hamas’s propaganda tactics, the group released a fake video of Daniella Gilboa’s ‘dead’ body, claiming she’d been killed in an IDF strike

Daniella Gilboa in a Hamas propaganda video in July 2024.

Last November, Hamas released a video showing the body of a woman covered in dust and rubble, announcing that she had been killed in an Israeli military strike.

Alongside the blurred picture, Hamas wrote: “One of the enemy’s female prisoners was killed in an area that is under Zionist aggression in the northern Gaza Strip.”

The terror group didn’t name the woman but her tattoos, visible through the dust, seemed to identify her as Daniella Gilboa, a young soldier who had been kidnapped during the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 2023.

Hours earlier, her captors had stalked into the room where Ms Gilboa was being held, and held up a camera, telling her: “Today we’re filming you dead.”

Ms Gilboa had been forced to take part in a Hamas propaganda video months earlier, in July and now, believing they were going to film her murder, she begged for her life. But instead of killing her, the militants forced her to lie down before covering her in powder – to simulate plaster dust – and rubble. They made sure her tattoos were showing, before filming her prone body.

When the video was published on Hamas’s Telegram channel, the Israeli military was unable to confirm whether it was Ms Gilboa or not. For the last three months, her family have been in limbo, unable to grieve a daughter they’d been told were dead but equally unable to hope for a daughter they couldn’t know was alive.

Daniella Gilboa (2nd L) with Naama Levy, Karina Ariev and Liri Albag, before being handed over to the Red Cross in Gaza City. Picture: AFP.

Their dread didn’t end when Hamas released the list of 33 hostages they said would be freed in the first phase of the ceasefire with Israel; the militant group admitted from the start that some of the people on the list were already dead.

When a frail Ms Gilboa walked into her family’s arms on January 25, the first thing she did was to apologise for breaking their hearts by taking part in the fake picture.

“When she saw me and my husband for the first time, she apologised for how she caused us to feel this whole time,” Ms Gilboa’s mother Orly told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.

Ms Gilboa, 20 is one of seven female ’spotter’ soldiers abducted from the IDF surveillance unit at the Nahal Oz army base in 2023. She was freed nearly three weeks ago with three other young female soldiers, after first being paraded on stage by their captors.

The release of the fake video is another display of Hamas tactics used to psychologically torture the hostages’ families – and the wider Israeli population.

It also explains why the Israeli military can’t confirm another claim by Hamas – that the two youngest hostages, Kfir and Ariel Bibas and their other Shiri were also killed in an IDF strike last November.

Daniella Gilboa gives a thumbs up to the waiting crowd from the door of the helicopter after arriving at Belinson-Schneider Hospital. Picture: Getty Images.

The children’s father Yarden was freed two weeks ago only to be told there was no proof of his family’s life or death.

His captors had exploited his fears for his family during his captivity, first telling him they were safe in Tel Aviv, then forcing another hostage to tell him they had been killed – as the militants filmed him collapsing in grief.

His sister Ofri recently told Israeli media that he came out of Gaza “with an understanding very similar to ours. That is: he understands that there is fear — fear for their lives, but he knows that there is no certainty, and he holds onto the hope.”

Over recent days, the released hostages have told the families of nine captives their sons were still alive, although some of them are in dreadful condition, and many have been tortured and kept chained in the dark for the whole of their captivity.

Mr Bibas has had no such proof of life of his family.

He can only hope now that just like Ms Gilboa’s fake video, the terrorists’ claims about his family were also false.