The Reuters news agency removed subtitles from a graphic video showing Palestinian militants seizing seven young Israeli women as hostages, acknowledging the on-screen transcriptions differed from the news agency's own translation of the Arabic audio.
The shocking footage, obtained from a group representing the hostages' families, captures the militants from the Hamas faction storming an Israeli army base near the Gaza border last October. It shows the captors handcuffing the female soldiers at gunpoint, threatening them with executions, and dragging them into seized military vehicles to be taken into Gaza.
Video: The video with the original subtitles / Credit: The Hostage and Missing Families Forum
The original video included English subtitles, presumably translated from the Arabic speech by the source that supplied the footage to media outlets. But in distributing the brutal scenes, Reuters decided to strip those subtitles after its own translations clashed with the on-screen text at certain points.
Most notably, the original subtitles indicate a Hamas militant referring to the young captives using a vulgar Arabic phrase that translates as "sex slaves" or "prostitutes." Reuters' translations rendered this simply as "the cheap ones" - a sanitized version of the derogatory language used about the hostages.
Video: The video with the modified subtitles / Credit: Reuters
"Reuters has removed subtitles on the video as there are discrepancies between the text on screen and audio translated by Reuters," the news agency said in its release notes.
The decision exposes a dilemma for major media outlets in an era of instantaneous content sharing from conflict zones. While amateur footage provides critical documentation, partisan groups may try shaping narratives through selectively misleading transcripts or translations.
In this case, the brutal language attributed to the militants underscores the dehumanizing treatment and potential sexual threats facing the hostages, now held by Hamas for over seven months despite global outrage.
Reuters said it could confirm the captives' identities matched those shared by The Hostages Families Forum. The video shows the visibly distressed young women, some with bloodied faces, being taunted that their "brothers have died because of you" and they would be shot.
The dramatic October 7th attack marked a serious escalation of Israeli-Palestinian violence last fall. Yet the fates of these female hostages, now in Hamas captivity for nearly eight months, remain desperately uncertain.
