Hamas and the Real Monsters, Inc.

The terror group’s underground Monstropolis – some of it hidden directly beneath children’s bedrooms – remains a hostage scream factory.

Cozying up with my grandchildren on the couch recently, I rewatched – for the umpteenth time – the film Monsters, Inc. and felt a sudden, creepy déjà vu unrelated to prior viewings.

Pixar’s 2001 animated feature has a clever premise: a team of outrageous-looking creatures nightly slip into children’s bedrooms to give a fright, capturing the kids’ curdling screams in sealed cannisters that are used to power the town of Monstropolis.

In a genius concept, the shaggy monsters, competing with one another for the most scream wattage, gain entry to their kiddie targets through a multitude of bedroom doors – pink, flowered, covered with cute decals and posters. The doors – hundreds of them lined up on a factory floor – are portals to childhood innocence, granting the monsters easy in-and-out access for their terror sorties undetected by watchful parents.

Of course, the monsters are mostly well-meaning, even cuddly, especially the leads voiced by Billy Crystal and John Goodman, though evildoers are lurking to cheat the leaderboard and twist the story.

But it began to hit me that I’ve seen a darker, sinister version of this movie before – and not on Disney+. Rather, the real Monstropolis playing over and over comes from scenes of the massive tunnel network running beneath the homes, hospitals, schools, mosques and yes, children’s bedrooms throughout Gaza. It’s a world of terror and screams out of sight to peering eyes above ground.

This past June, IDF troops revealed the entrance to one Hamas shaft on the floor of a child’s bedroom in Rafah. Beneath a shelf of stuffed animals and a blanket decorated with Snoopy and Woodstock was an adult-sized hole leading to what the IDF said was a stash of weapons and explosives, including multiple hand grenades, chargers and munitions, not to mention a butcher’s knife.  Similar finds have turned up across Gaza’s battered urbanscape.

Hamas’s enterprising ogres showed their most monstrous handiwork in late August, when the bodies of six hostages – including 23-year-old Hersh Goldberg-Polin – were found executed in a tunnel reportedly accessed beneath an enclosed children’s play yard in Rafah. Its plasterboard walls had been adorned with cheerful images of Mickey Mouse and Snow White; a colorful LOVE stamp was cut off where the wall was presumably taken out in an Israeli strike.

According to images released in September by the IDF, the shaft’s entrance was directly under a child’s bedroom, leading to an underground passage that stretched 65 feet, was barely three feet wide and five feet high, “with no bathroom, poor ventilation and a metal door at the end,” the Wall Street Journal reported. An IDF spokesman told the Jerusalem Post, “Here, we can see their blood on the floor. This is where their final moments occurred.”

In the Pixar tale, a slithery shape-shifting serpent named Randall (voiced by Steve Buscemi) kidnaps a little girl called Boo who stumbles into the scare factory. Randall has plans to snatch lots of kids and harvest greater volumes of fearful shrieks through an invention he calls the Scream Extractor.

In the Gaza version, Hamas militants have freely moved in and out of ordinary safe zones to wage their holy war against Israel and also shuttle around those kidnapped on October 7. The hostages held captive for a full year beneath floors and behind walls – and from whom Hamas has extracted enough screams to last a lifetime and beyond – are the poker chips with which the group has prolonged its standoff with Israel and fueled its psychological edge, and even its propaganda war.

The eeriest parallel between comic and tragic is Pixar’s Henry J. Waternoose, the multi-eyed, crab-legged CEO of Monsters, Inc. With a booming baritone delivered by the late James Coburn, Waternoose cheers on his team, then goes ballistic when he learns that his top scarer Sulley wants to return the little girl back to the safety of her bedroom. “I’ll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die, and I’ll silence anyone who gets in my way!” he pledges.

Sound familiar? It’s the kind of vow Hamas leadership has repeatedly made in signaling its intention, if given the opportunity, to repeat the horrors of October 7 in the name of resistance. Perversely, it’s also what monster CEOs like Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh indicated they will tolerate in turning their own children and citizens into martyrs to the cause.

Naturally, the folks at Pixar found a way to flip their script – Waternoose is outed and arrested for his deranged plot, and the scarers learn that little Boo’s squealy laughs are 10 times stronger than screams for solving the town’s energy shortage.

If only such solutions were available for shifting the narrative in the real Monstropolis. If only the Hamas scare factory could be shut down for good – perhaps then, a cease fire could be reached. Any child knows that.

Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.