Gal Gadot’s newest movie screening — featuring Hamas atrocities — is drawing criticism
The Israeli movie star Gal Gadot is being harshly criticized for ignoring the Palestinian experience.

Gal Gadot smiling earlier this year. Courtesy of Getty Images
Gal Gadot is apparently promoting a new movie, premiering on Wednesday
This film, however, is not associated with a comic book franchise or slated to break box office records like other Gal Gadot blockbuster movies. Instead, Bearing Witness to the October 7 Massacre, is a roughly 45-minute long video compiled by the Israel Defense Forces from video taken during the terrorist attack, showing graphic images including children being shot and killed.
Two weeks ago, the IDF showed the video to the Knesset as well as a set of invited journalists in Israel. The goal, seemingly, was to provide proof of the atrocities committed by Hamas, some of which had been disputed in the weeks following the attacks. But in deference to the families of the victims, the film, compiled largely from footage shot by Hamas terrorists on helmet cams or phones, was not distributed widely.
Tuesday, however, the American Jewish Committee hosted a screening of the video in New York, and Gadot is hosting one on Wednesday at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The invitees are no longer members of the press and government, invited for fact-checking purposes, but instead influential figures including celebrities.
Hasbara, the Hebrew word for information — also often translated as propaganda — has long been a major front in Israel’s public relations. Israel’s heavy bombing of Gaza in response to the Oct. 7, has brought especially harsh criticism of the country, including widespread protests and accusations of genocide and war crimes from activists, influencers and politicians. Israel, for its part, has been fighting back with social media posts that emphasize the brutality of the Hamas attack and frame the war in stark good v. evil moral terms.
As the war continues, and international attention turns increasingly to the civilian death toll in Gaza, which has reportedly broken 10,000 this week, Israel has worked to keep its own dead and kidnapped in the public eye. However, as time progresses, critics of Israel have increasingly begun to sow doubt about the initial reports of the scale and intensity of the violence. So it makes sense that, despite the earlier concerns about respecting victim’s families, who oppose releasing the video more widely, Bearing Witness is being shown to a wider audience, one calculated toward moving influential people into speaking out in support of Israel, and leveraging familiar faces and names to vouch for the truth of the accounts.
The renewed efforts to screen the film come as Israel “is losing on the communication front,” Jerome Bourdon, a communications expert at Tel Aviv University, told The Times of Israel, though a spokesperson denied that public reaction to Israel’s bombing in Gaza has impacted the screenings.
Gal Gadot — who rose to fame in Hollywood for playing the all-American hero Wonder Woman — is, theoretically, perfectly positioned to recruit fellow celebrities to Israel’s cause in the U.S. But she is an imperfect spokesperson. There was the time she recruited a bunch of other famous people to sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” during the early days of the pandemic, which was widely derided by critics and Twitter users alike for being out of touch with the real grief — and death toll — of the pandemic.
Similarly, Gadot is being harshly criticized online for her focus on Israel’s death toll, when Gaza’s is now many times larger.
Nearly every comment and retweet of a widely-shared post from the Palestinian Quds News Network announcing the screening slammed Gadot, and many have garnered thousands of likes. Some referenced the infamous “Imagine” video to deride her ability to read or shift public opinion, while still more condemned Gadot both for her lack of acting ability and her support of Israel.
Gadot has not spoken out specifically about Israel’s tactics in the war, but has posted nearly frequently about the people kidnapped from Israel and held hostage by Hamas, asking for their freedom.
Counterintuitively, despite harshly criticizing Gal Gadot online, some activists have warned each other to avoid protesting outside the LA screening.
“This event is a ZIONIST TRAP,” reads a widely screenshotted Instagram story about Gadot’s screening. “Their main goal is to get photos of Muslims/Arabs/brown and Black folks protesting outside the Museum of Tolerance to capture it as ‘antisemitism’ and derail the work we been doing.”
The guest list for the event is reported to be 120 people.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Most Popular
- 1
News School Israel trip turns ‘terrifying’ for LA students attacked by Israeli teens
- 2
Culture Cardinals are Catholic, not Jewish — so why do they all wear yarmulkes?
- 3
Fast Forward Why the Antisemitism Awareness Act now has a religious liberty clause to protect ‘Jews killed Jesus’ statements
- 4
Fast Forward Ye debuts ‘Heil Hitler’ music video that includes a sample of a Hitler speech
In Case You Missed It
-
Yiddish קאָנצערט לכּבֿוד דעם ייִדישן שרײַבער און רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלערConcert honoring Yiddish writer and editor Boris Sandler
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
-
Fast Forward Trump’s new pick for surgeon general blames the Nazis for pesticides on our food
-
Fast Forward Jewish feud over Trump escalates with open letter in The New York Times
-
Fast Forward First American pope, Leo XIV, studied under a leader in Jewish-Catholic relations
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.