ISLAMABAD: Indian television has a pattern in how it deals with security crises. First, there is an attack, followed by a search for a foreign villain that matches the outrage. This year, the villain has a new name: Hamas.
The pattern started after the April 2025 attack in Pahalgam, Indian-Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), that killed 26 people. Within days, India was blaming Pakistan for the attack without a shred of evidence. Despite Pakistan's repeated calls for an impartial, third-party investigation into the matter, the government of hardliner Narendra Modi embarked on another reckless misadventure: militarily attacking its nuclear-armed neighbor -- and losing several Rafales in spectacular fashion.
Fast forward to August 2026 and a phrase has been circulating across Indian newsrooms: the "Pakistan playbook," a claim that separatist groups active in IIOJK had copied Hamas's October 2023 attack on Israel and transplanted it into the Himalayas.
Times Now, News18 and India Today built months of coverage on that phrase. But each piece of it collapses once you ask three basic questions: what exactly is being claimed, who is claiming it, and does the claim survive contact with the facts?
The recycled recording
Take the clip that gets replayed most often. News18's program Vantage with Palki Sharma broadcast a segment titled "Hamas Asks 'Brave' Pakistan For Help Against Israel." The segment presented Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as personally appealing to Pakistan for military help, framed as proof of a live, ongoing "alliance" between the two.
He never made that appeal.
Haniyeh was killed in an Israeli strike in Tehran on July 31, 2024. Indian media tried to use footage of a man who has been dead for nearly two years as if it were current news.
A claim that two entities (one of them an internationally recognized state) are actively coordinating cannot rest on a recording made of a dead person. That is not evidence of an alliance. It is evidence that Indian television will recycle anything with the word Hamas attached to it.
'Unresolved' becomes 'Confirmed'
Now take the claim built around the actual criminal investigation. India's National Investigation Agency filed a 1,597-page chargesheet on the Pahalgam attack. Times Now anchored prime-time coverage around this document, telling viewers it proved a confirmed "connection" between the attack’s perpetrators and Hamas.
Here is what the chargesheet actually says, and why that matters.
According to the document, the NIA's own language describes any Hamas connection as "one of the key unresolved aspects of the investigation."
In plain terms: after more than a year of work, India's own investigators, with full access to India's own intelligence agencies, have not been able to establish this link themselves. They call it unresolved because that's exactly what it is.
Meanwhile, Times Now reported it as solved.
Those two things cannot both be true, and the chargesheet itself settles which one is accurate. When a country's own investigative agency admits it hasn't proven something, that country's television networks reporting it as proven is not journalism. It is a claim manufactured to fill airtime that the government's own paperwork does not support.
One clip, multiple claims
The appearance of a large body of proof depends on a separate trick worth naming directly. Among the citations underlying this broader "Pakistan playbook" reporting, the identical News18 broadcast, the same Haniyeh segment described above, appears twice in the source list, filed under two different links as though two separate reports had independently reached the same conclusion.
One video, aired once, was catalogued twice and presented as double confirmation. That is not two sources agreeing. That is one source, counted twice, to make a thin case look thicker than it is.
When Indian coverage claims "multiple reports" have confirmed a Hamas connection, ask how many of those reports are actually the same clip wearing a different headline. Often, it is most of them.
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Tunnels, et al
The tactical version of this story claims something more specific: that tunnels, the use of hospitals and civilian buildings, and helmet-mounted cameras during attacks show that separatist groups in IIOJK (which New Delhi claims are backed by Islamabad) copied Hamas's exact operational methods, as reported by Firstpost, News18 and India Today.
This claim misunderstands what Hamas actually is and what Pakistan actually is. Hamas is a non-state group governing a blockaded strip of land roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) long, with no air force, no navy, and no standing army capable of meeting Israel's military on open ground.
Pakistan is an internationally recognized nuclear-armed state with a standing army of more than 650,000 soldiers, an air force, and a seat at the United Nations. A state with a nuclear deterrent and a conventional military has no structural reason to adopt tactics developed specifically by a besieged non-state militia.
Comparing the two treats a state and a group under siege as though they were interchangeable, which they are not.
The individual tactics fail on their own terms as well.
Underground tunnel warfare goes back to the Viet Cong in the 1960s. Using civilians as cover was the defining tactic of the Tamil Tigers during Sri Lanka's civil war, a conflict with no link to the Middle East. Fighters in Chechnya and Syria were filming their own raids with helmet cameras years before October 2023 occurred.
These methods appear across guerrilla conflicts on every continent because they are the standard toolkit of irregular warfare, not because one group invented them and passed them to another. No financial record, no intercepted communication, and no named intermediary made public shows training or funding moving from Gaza to IIOJK.
A shared method between two unconnected groups is not proof of a shared plan.
Gaza vs. Kashmir
The final claim needs its background explained clearly because Indian coverage rarely bothers to do so.
In 2025, the United States brokered ceasefire negotiations for Gaza, mediated by officials including Jared Kushner, under a plan called the Board of Peace. One commentary piece, published on the Middle East Forum, an opinion site rather than an intelligence source, warned that international mediators would let Hamas survive any deal while dressing it up as a win, describing this as an attempt to "take a cucumber, paint it yellow, and sell it as a cucumber."
Indian defense commentary lifted that line and applied it to Pakistan, warning that if a similar peace process ever extended to Kashmir, the same trick would let ‘militant’ infrastructure there survive under cover of a diplomatic win.
But there is no Kashmir ceasefire process underway. No international board is deliberating Indian occupation of Jammu and Kashmir, and no negotiation resembling the Gaza talks exists for South Asia.
Set all five of these side by side, and the pattern is plain. A dead man's supposed recording stands in for a living alliance. An agency's own admission of uncertainty gets reported as certainty. One video clip gets counted as several. A besieged group's survival tactics get assigned to a nuclear state that never needed them. And a warning about a negotiation happening in Gaza gets applied to a negotiation that does not exist in Indian-occupied Kashmir.
None of that is an investigation. It is a story Indian television keeps deciding to tell, regardless of what the facts underneath it actually say.