Images of Palestinian children in Gaza, emaciated by hunger under the blockade imposed by Israel, and of families grieving the more than 61,000 people killed in the territory have stirred outrage among foreign governments and much of the global public. Inside Israel, however, the reaction has been markedly different.
In a poll conducted in late July by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), more than three-quarters of Jewish Israelis – 79% – said they were either “not very troubled” or “not troubled at all” by reports of famine and suffering among Gaza’s Palestinian population.
According to Anat Saragusti, an expert on the media, the reason is simple: most people in Israel are unaware of those reports because for months they have never seen them.
“Until a couple of weeks ago, you could count only a handful of reports from Gaza not filtered by the IDF,” said Saragusti, the head of freedom of the press at the Union of Journalists in Israel. Except for a few newspapers such as the leftwing Haaretz, she said, “all the other mainstream media completely ignored what’s going on on the Palestinian side – the human casualties there, the numbers of children killed in this war. The Israeli audience simply did not see that at all.”
In the past few weeks, the growing focus on the issue in the international media has led to some Israeli newspapers and TV channels reporting on hunger in Gaza for the first time, albeit as a debatable issue.
Since the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023, public debate in Israel has largely centred on national security, the plight of the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas, and the country’s military goals in Gaza. In that climate, the humanitarian disaster caused by the Israeli assault on Gaza has tended to occupy a marginal place in the minds of many Jewish Israelis, who largely view the conflict as a legitimate act of self-defence in response to Hamas’s attacks – although polls also show a clear majority want a deal with Hamas to end the war in exchange for the freedom of the remaining Israeli hostages.
Media analysts say Israel’s main broadcasters have largely embraced the narrative of a government described as the most far-right in the country’s history.
For months, the Israeli media have responded to international outrage by focusing on Israeli claims that the widespread hunger documented by numerous aid agencies is “a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign” – summed up by Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim last month: “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.”
According to UN World Food Programme, one-third of the Palestinian population in Gaza is going for days without eating, and half a million are on the brink of starvation.
“The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” the UN-backed group the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said last month, calling for an urgent ceasefire to alleviate “widespread starvation”.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), another five people died last week due to malnutrition and starvation, bringing the total number of malnutrition-related deaths to 227, including 103 children, since October 2023.
Even Donald Trump, Netanyahu’s key international ally, when asked if he agreed with the Israeli PM on the issue, said: “I don’t know … those children look very hungry … that’s real starvation stuff.”
In a rare press conference with foreign journalists in Jerusalem last Sunday, Netanyahu displayed photographs of skeletal children in Gaza and dismissed them as fake, claiming they were part of a Hamas plot to attack Israel.
He compared these images with a photograph of the Israeli hostage Evyatar David released by the Palestinian militant group early in August, pointing out that while the man held in Gaza appeared to be starving to death, the arm of a Hamas fighter visible in the frame looked strong and muscular. The implication was clear, according to the prime minister: the fighters of Hamas were eating well and keeping food from the Israeli hostages and from the public of Gaza.
Saragusti said: “Despite images of emaciated children published by major newspapers around the world, Israel pushed back. And Israeli media outlets adopted the narrative set out by the Israeli leadership, insisting that there is no starvation in Gaza.”
As Etan Nechin, Haaretz’s New York correspondent, wrote: “After Netanyahu lost the election to Ehud Barak in 1999, reporters heard him say: ‘When I return, I’ll have my own media outlet.’”
Today, two major media organisations are known for their backing of Netanyahu: Israel Hayom, the free daily with the deep pockets of Sheldon Adelson, the US Republican mega-donor; and Channel 14, a right-leaning broadcaster that went on air in 2014.
“They changed Israel’s media landscape, and in the years that followed, a plethora of new hard-right outlets were established,” said Nechin.
Although Israel appears to exist within its own bubble, shielded by a narrative that leaves no room for the suffering of people in Gaza, thousands of demonstrators who recently filled the streets of Tel Aviv are now urging the government to halt the atrocities against the Palestinians.
“I think it is horrendous what is happening in Gaza,” said Lenny Kadmon, 19. “I think that the main reason not everyone here is against it is because most people find it too difficult or too scary to look at themselves and at what we do in Gaza.”
Gal Alkalay, 28, said: “I come here to protest in Tel Aviv every weekend. We ask our PM to end the war. Only in this way we can end the starvation in Gaza and the return of our hostages.”
And yet, despite a growing number of Israeli intellectuals using the word “genocide” to describe their government’s actions in Gaza – as the award-winning author David Grossman did just a fortnight ago – analysts say they remain a small minority.
In Jerusalem, where tensions between Arabs and Israelis are sharper, the majority of Jewish residents continue to align themselves with the narrative of Israel’s political leadership.
Asked what she thought of the suffering of Palestinian children in Gaza, Myriam Israel, 34, said: “I think people should also see the suffering of our children terrorised by Hamas. But the world thinks only about children of Gaza. I think Hamas needs to think about their own children. And we need to think about the security of our country.”
Zalman Coleman, 21, said: “All you have to do is use your brain five seconds and you can see that Hamas’s ultimate aim is to get that number [of deaths] as high as possible. And then from that, turn the whole world’s face against Israel. [In this conflict] the media had so much potential to do so much good in the world. But they chose fake news.”
Since the Hamas-led attacks of 2023, Israel has almost completely barred foreign journalists from entering Gaza – an unprecedented move in the history of modern conflict, marking one of the rare moments that reporters have been denied access to an active war zone.
Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists have formally called for Gaza to be opened to foreign media, warning that current measures severely undermine press freedom.
Many argue that the Israeli ban is a deliberate tactic to restrict independent scrutiny, limit international visibility of the conflict, and thus control the narrative.
“The only way to enter Gaza and cover the war is to embed in Israeli army units,” said Saragusti – and even that is rarely allowed. “There is no independent press in Gaza. There are only the Palestinian journalists, who many of them have been killed. Israel claims that there is no starvation but doesn’t let the foreign press in to check by itself whether there is starvation or not.”
Up to now, she added, “the press blockade has succeeded very well in its goal”.
