This week, the former IDF soldier Ilana Gritzewsky stood before the United Nations Security Council, recounting the ordeal of her 55 days in Gaza captivity. She described hunger, abuse, and injury, presenting herself as a symbol of Israeli suffering. Western media amplified her words, framing them as evidence of Hamas’ cruelty.
Yet for many observers, Gritzewsky’s testimony represented something else entirely: another instance of Israel parading its citizens as victims to distract from its own crimes. Even as she spoke in New York, Israeli forces continued their relentless bombardment of Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians — overwhelmingly civilians, many of them women and children — have been killed since October 2023. Entire neighborhoods have been flattened, hospitals destroyed, and starvation weaponized. To date, Israel has faced no serious accountability, shielded by Western vetoes at the very UN where Gritzewsky spoke.
The contrast could not be sharper. While Israel positions former prisoners of war released safely by Hamas from Palestine at the center of global attention, the massive genocidal campaign it is waging against Gaza’s trapped and real civilian population continues with impunity.
A Kibbutz Built on Stolen Land
Gritzewsky’s story cannot be separated from the ground she was taken from: Kibbutz Nir Oz, a community established in 1955 on the lands of the destroyed Palestinian village al-Maʿin Abu Sitta.
On 14 May 1948, Haganah units stormed that village, destroying its school, burning houses, and forcing residents into exile in Gaza. Civilians were killed in the assault, though exact numbers are unrecorded. Their descendants remain refugees to this day, watching their former lands transformed into Israeli farmland.
The UN General Assembly recognized the crime immediately, passing Resolution 194 in December 1948, affirming the right of Palestinians to return or be compensated. Israel ignored it. Instead, in 1950, the Knesset passed the Absentees’ Property Law, seizing all refugee property for the state. Nir Oz was planted on this stolen land.
October 7 in Context
When Palestinians from Gaza broke through the fence on October 7, 2023, Nir Oz was one of the communities they struck. For Israel, it was a massacre of innocent civilians. For Palestinians, it was an act of war against a settlement built on land violently stolen from them and denied back for three-quarters of a century.
International law distinguishes between civilians, who cannot be targeted, and combatants, who can. Israel and its allies insist that abductees like Gritzewsky and her partner Matan Zangauker were hostages. Hamas, however, argues that in a state with compulsory military service and reserve duty, every Israeli is part of the military system. To them, those taken from Nir Oz are not hostages but prisoners of war.
Manufactured Narratives of Abuse
Central to Israel’s propaganda effort has been the weaponization of sexual violence claims. Gritzewsky has repeatedly referred to sexual abuse during her abduction, but her account rests mainly on an incident while being transported on a motorbike into Gaza, when she says one captor touched her breast at a time she was also largely unconscious.
Israeli officials have aggressively amplified such testimonies to portray Hamas as systematic sexual predators. Yet independent investigations have not substantiated these sweeping claims, and major watchdogs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have not published findings confirming them. On Israeli television, young female hostages themselves admitted they were not raped in captivity.
The leap from isolated incidents to charges of systematic rape appears to be politically manufactured, timed to counter growing global outrage over Israel’s devastation of Gaza. It is another performance of victimhood designed to recast Israel — an occupying military power — as the aggrieved party.
Matan Zangauker: Soldier or Something Worse?
While Gritzewsky now travels the world as a public advocate, her partner Matan Zangauker remains in Gaza. Hamas describes him as a soldier, though it is unknown whether he was active in the IDF at the time of capture.
What is clear is that Zangauker was employed in Nir Oz’s cannabis greenhouses, part of a state-licensed operation under CannDoc. Critics point out that, in practice, Nir Oz functioned as a recreational drugs farm under the guise of medical licensing, linked to Israel’s lucrative export trade.
From a Palestinian perspective, this work carries its own gravity. To steal land and then use it to cultivate cannabis for profit is doubly offensive: first, because zulm (oppression) through dispossession is condemned throughout the Qur’an; and second, because producing intoxicants violates Islam’s prohibition on narcotics, deemed destructive to body, mind, and soul. If exported with the intent of targeting youth, the offense is magnified — seen as corrupting the next generation and spreading social ruin.
In this light, Palestinians may see Zangauker not merely as a soldier of an occupying state, but as someone engaged in occupation, exploitation, and corruption simultaneously — a symbol of the system they rose against on October 7.
Justice Denied, Conflict Renewed
Ilana Gritzewsky’s appearance at the UN Security Council exemplifies how Israel projects its citizens’ suffering on the world stage, demanding sympathy, while hiding the infinitely greater suffering it inflicts on Palestinians.
In 1948, the UN told Israel to let refugees return or compensate them. Israel instead passed laws to seize their lands forever. Seventy-five years later, Palestinians stormed the kibbutz built on that very land. To Israel, it was terrorism. To Palestinians, it was justice delayed but not denied.
Whether Ilana and Matan are remembered as hostages or as prisoners of war, their stories cannot erase the larger reality: that a state founded on dispossession and maintained through impunity will continue to face resistance until 1948’s crimes are reckoned with.
