News/Commentary

Gaza journalist admits he hid footage of Israeli hostages being beaten

September 23, 2026 | | Print Article

An Islamist so-called “journalist” who’s pals with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been outed as a stooge for the terrorist group Hamas.

“Journalist” Motaz Azaiza, who, amazingly enough, has been nominated for a Nobel Prize, admitted this week to purposefully hiding footage of Israeli hostages being attacked by Hamas during the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack.

According to the New York Post, Azaiza admitted during a podcast appearance that he was in Gaza when Hamas returned from the terror attack and began marching hostages through the street.

“People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed,” he said on the podcast. “But I did not publish those videos.”

Instead, he did Hamas’ dirty work by hiding the videos and thus protecting Hamas from the consequences it deserved.

“As for the video I recorded of Israeli hostages being held by Hamas, I filmed it inside Gaza while doing my job as a photojournalist,” Azaiza shamelessly admitted. “I chose not to publish it because I feared that revealing the location could put Palestinian civilians in the area at risk.”

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“I did not want to ruin the lives of the people [terrorists] who were filmed,” he continued. “I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them. I did not want to be responsible, even indirectly, for the deaths of those people [terrorists] in exchange for a few likes and views online.”

The terror-respecting “journalist” also let it be known that every so-called “journalist in Gaza” is a member of an online, Hamas-run group that the terrorist group uses to spread its propaganda.

In fairness to Azaiza, he’s previously recorded Palestinians dissing Hamas. And for that, he was persecuted by the terrorist group.

“Photographers in Gaza have become accustomed to lowering their cameras the moment someone says something bad about Hamas because anyone who dares to show reality is persecuted relentlessly,” he said.

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He also denied being part of the Oct. 7 terror attack.

“I was not part of it in any way,” he insisted. “I was in Gaza doing my job: documenting what was happening in front of me.”

Still, few believe this small admission is enough to make up for his much larger and more damaging admission. Even fewer still believe that it’s at all acceptable for Mayor Mamdani to be hobnobbing with this guy:

Azaiza also once met with Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Doha.

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And according to critics, he participated in the pro-Hamas uprising at Columbia University.

“This is how terrorism spreads and threatens Western institutions,” one critic wrote on social media while pointing to Azaiza’s behavior.

Despite this record, he was once nominated for a Nobel Prize. And two years ago, Time magazine named him one of its 100 most influential people.

“For 108 days, Motaz Azaiza acted as the world’s eyes and ears in his native Gaza,” the shamelessly leftist magazine wrote about him. “Armed with a camera and a flak jacket marked ‘PRESS,’ the 25-year-old Palestinian photographer spent nearly four months documenting life under Israeli bombardment.”

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Vivek Saxena
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