In the theatre of tyranny, image is everything. And in Gaza this week, the curtain was torn down in the most horrific of ways.
According to reports widely circulated by Visegrád 24, 22-year-old Odai Saadi – one of the vocal leaders of this week’s anti-Hamas protests – was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Hamas operatives. His broken body was dumped outside his family home. A performance of terror for an audience that dares to whisper dissent.
This isn’t suppression. It’s spectacle. A macabre, medieval-style warning shot, dressed up in modern brutality. The sort of optics only dictators and cults of control rely on when their grip starts to loosen.
There’s an old rule in the dark arts of communication: when your legitimacy wavers, fear fills the void. Raw, bloody, inhuman and brutally effective.
Or is it?
Hamas’s grip is loosening
Here’s the strategic misstep: in the age of viral truth and digital witness, brutality doesn’t silence – it broadcasts. Footage allegedly showing Saadi’s mutilated body is already doing the rounds. It’s the kind of visceral content that media gatekeepers once shielded us from. Not anymore. The truth bleeds through the cracks – and with it, the myth of Hamas’s unshakable authority is beginning to unravel.
When your own people start to rise, and you respond with a medieval punishment parade, you’re not preserving control – you’re lighting the fuse on your own demise.
The question now is: Will the world look away, or finally stare at this grim reality and call it what it is?
