In December 2023, nearly three months after the October 7 massacre, the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies gathered members of the country’s media. Run out of Tel Aviv University, in a modern building on the campus surrounded by well-kept lawns and native trees, the INSS had a controversial task for the congregated press: Assess how the media was responding to Israel’s war on Gaza.
For months on TV, nationalism, grief, and revenge had mixed freely. Israeli victims’ testimonies were common, as were first responders’ accounts. The idea of a second Holocaust, requiring a massive military response, was a regular talking point. But the suffering in Gaza was hardly noted. By mid-December, close to 20,000 people in Gaza had been killed. The group summoned by the INSS—keeping anonymous for fear of backlash—hoped to examine their own media’s self-imposed iron curtain on the disaster unfolding on the other side of the border.
The discussion, as revealed in an INSS report published months later, portrayed a startling scene: Israeli media had shown the public extensive images of destruction and rubble resulting from Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 terrorist attack, but had all but ignored the resulting humanitarian catastrophe.
On TV, and in mainstream newspapers, it was (and is) rare to see a dead child or a starving mother. While feeds in the United States, Europe, and Israel’s neighbors have been filled with ghastly images of death and harrowing casualty statistics, most of this information has not reached the audience that arguably needs to see it most: the Israeli public.
One media executive in Israel admitted that directors at her outlet “made a conscious decision…to hide what was happening in Gaza from Israeli readers and viewers.”
Across local media, Israeli troop movements are detailed, and impassioned analysis continues. But the mainstream press has steered far clear of questioning the high civilian death tolls and level of destruction in Gaza. Palestinian voices have been silenced, the report noted, and the Israelis who called for an end to the war were often canceled. On hard-right Israeli news, like Channel 14, when an image is shown of a dead Gazan, it is not to show the costs of the campaign. Instead, it is almost always to celebrate the effectiveness of the Israel Defense Forces or to illustrate the supposed ease of Hamas’ propaganda campaign in fooling a gullible Western press.
There have been “only a bare scattering of reports on the huge scale of the humanitarian crisis” on television, Anat Saragusti of the Union of Journalists in Israel, a labor organization, wrote in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz. And there are only a “handful of reports on primetime mainstream media telling the story of Palestinian civilians.”
In the INSS report, one media executive admitted that the directors at her outlet “made a conscious decision…to hide what was happening in Gaza from Israeli readers and viewers.” In so doing, the outlet had become “part of [an] ongoing influence campaign waged by the State,” the report said. More broadly, Israeli news organizations “knowingly abandoned” journalistic norms to “make way for unity, patriotism, and much less criticism of those on the ground.”
Ayala Panievsky, a journalism scholar at City St George’s, University of London and author of the book The New Censorship, has data to back up Saragusti’s assertion. A random sample of hundreds of segments during the first six months of the war from Channel 12, the highest-rated newscast in Israel at the time, contained only four mentions of civilian casualties in Gaza.
As the number of casualties has continued to rise, the ratio of coverage has not noticeably changed. “We have been watching the news every day since,” she said, and “this hasn’t changed significantly.” Apart from Haaretz, “everything that’s happening in Gaza is very much absent from the mainstream media.”
The Israeli public has been left to form its opinions based on social media, independent outlets, and what it can cobble together from mainstream news items that hew to the IDF line. In a political atmosphere largely dominated by an explosive mix of grief and nationalism, foreign news reports on atrocities are regularly dismissed as “blood libel” driven by antisemitism. A poll conducted in May found that 64 percent of Israelis don’t want additional information on what happens in Gaza. The media, created by and for the people, is both complicit in constructing, and blinded by, this national ethos.
The erasure of Gazan pain has left a mark. While Israelis are increasingly weary of the war and its effects within the country, the way it has been conducted has rarely been discussed. The fate of the Palestinian population remains immaterial to most. Large protests—like the ones that accompanied the government’s attempted judicial coup before the war—are irregular. Antiwar activists focused mainly on the risk that the Gaza campaign posed to the return of hostages, not also on the death and suffering inflicted on Gazans. Absent the images of pain and despair, many Israelis can continue to see themselves as the only victims while dehumanizing those on the other side.
Broadcast journalists reported heroically on the October 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks, at least initially, in some cases beating the army to the scene of massacres. For hours, as the only ones who knew what was going on, reporters functioned as an impromptu, ersatz police dispatch, coordinating assistance in the absence of any military presence in areas under attack, and providing moral support to Israelis hiding from Hamas as a horrified nation watched the events unfold live.
The mainstream Israeli media has not been averse to airing intense criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—at least when it comes to its alleged corruption or domestic incompetence. But journalists have largely failed to broadcast or publish criticisms of the war, or even the horrific images the rest of the world has grown accustomed to from Gaza—of gaunt faces and maimed civilians.
As Israel and Hamas take steps toward a potential end to the war in Gaza, the effect of the media’s complicity will continue to play out. It will shape how Israel understands the past two years of conflict, and how the world understands a nation that saw the war in starkly different terms.
“Many people around worldwide are asking themselves what’s going on in the public opinion in Israel,” Panievsky says. “I think you cannot understand where it is without understanding the kind of blindness that the Israeli media promotes.”
It is not uncommon for media organizations to sanitize armed conflict. During the United States’ war on Iraq starting in 2003, the mainstream media vastly underreported the bloody toll inflicted by coalition forces, leading many in the States, according to one study, to make “grossly inaccurate” estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths. But the downplaying of deaths in Israeli coverage of the war on Gaza exceeds anything seen in democratic countries in half a century or more, observers say. “What we are seeing now is different,” Panievsky told us. The dissonance was “never [as] big” as in Israel today.
When civilian deaths have come up in Israeli news reports, they are usually invoked to examine how foreign media coverage is harming Israel. A July Channel 13 newscast ignored the realities of starvation in Gaza in favor of discussing the coverage of starvation by London’s Daily Express—while blurring an image the paper had published showing a child suffering from severe malnutrition. Photos and footage from Gaza are typically dismissed as Hamas propaganda or fictional creations of “Pallywood.” (The nationalistic Channel 14, which does not adhere to journalistic standards and hews to a right-wing line comparable to Newsmax or the One America News Network, tends to applaud—or ridicule—reports of Gazan death and suffering.)
Consider a Channel 11 segment that aired on August 2. Reporter Rubi Hammerschlag, embedded with IDF forces in Gaza, presents “rare footage of Hamas terrorists, surrendering to a battle group” in Beit Hanoun. The captured men come out of a tunnel surrounded by rubble. An army officer in full combat gear, his face hidden by a balaclava and sunglasses, explains that the army is ready to “continue its mission to uncover, hit and defeat, till all the [Hamas] bases are destroyed and the last terrorists have surrendered.”
The report continues with footage of humanitarian supplies being parachuted into Gaza, and crowds running toward the landing point. Hammerschlag reads aloud an IDF statement: “The deceitful starvation campaign is a willful attempt, well-timed and a lie. Its aim is to blame the IDF, a military with high moral standards, for war crimes. The one to blame for the deaths and suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants is Hamas.” Concurrent footage shows a woman preparing a soup and distributing it to a small group of children, including a toddler, whom she feeds with a spoon.
At nearly the same time, the New York Times reported a sharp increase in deaths around Israeli-managed aid distribution sites, and the BBC noted that “as the starvation crisis grows in Gaza…Israel itself has been accused by aid agencies of pushing Gaza towards famine by weaponizing food in its war against Hamas.” The latter report mentioned an investigation that cited “over 160 cases where children have been shot in Gaza and found that in 95 cases the child was shot in the head or chest.”
When Israeli broadcast journalists have questioned the IDF’s actions, the critiques almost always revolve around the safety of Israeli soldiers and the safe return of the hostages, but almost never Palestinian deaths. Oren Meyers, a former journalist and associate professor of communications at the University of Haifa, has dubbed these “reaffirming criticisms”—tools that allow domestic journalists to assert their professional independence “without challenging the establishment’s basic assumptions.”
The breadth and depth of the trauma of October 7 only begins to explain the news outlets’ attitude. Nearly every Israeli has a close connection to a victim of the attacks. Nir Hasson, a reporter for Haaretz, noted that the trauma is also “still going on because of the issue of the hostages.” (Last week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire deal that would see Israeli hostages come home. Early Monday, the last 20 living hostages from Gaza returned to Israel.)
But journalists’ personal trauma and shared national memory and grief do not fully explain the self-censorship. In the lead-up to the war, for-profit media was also struggling to hold onto viewers. A decline in interest in TV news had taken hold. The response, in many cases, has been to engage viewers with nationalistic messages.
“Commercial television has to keep their viewers,” Saragusti told us, and while viewership is declining everywhere, experience has shown that “war is something that makes people glued to the television.”
A Knesset committee report of 2021, working on the Israeli broadcast regulations, confirmed that viewing habits in Israel follow the same trends in the rest of the world—the number of linear television viewers is in constant decline, with the increase in popularity of video on demand platforms, both local and international.
“You cannot understand [Israeli opinion on the war] without understanding the kind of blindness that the Israeli media promotes.”
There is also, as we have seen recently with corporate broadcasters in the United States, a fear of retribution by the government. Netanyahu—who has grown increasingly populist to strengthen his shaky political alliances with messianic extremists—has reinforced the media’s shift by introducing a package of legislation and intimidation campaigns.
One proposed law would privatize the public broadcaster Channel 11 and shutter its news division. Another would take control of the independent board that determines advertising rates based on viewership. By attempting to grab the purse strings of each channel’s economic viability, Netanyahu’s government is asserting direct influence on the media. Saragusti points to a “chilling effect” wherein some outlets “adopt a mode of censorship—and this is something that is very difficult to quantify.”
Beyond the financial threats are the intensifying political and personal attacks. Individual journalists and outlets have been subjected to a smear campaign orchestrated by citizens—reporters’ faces displayed on billboards “as enemies of the people, basically,” Panievsky says—and “ongoing digital harassment.”
Media that flatters the government has been rewarded. Channel 14, created in 2014 as an outlet dedicated to Jewish heritage, has repeatedly violated its license by broadcasting news before it had acquired a license to do so, which Israeli law requires. But the government has overlooked enforcement of license breaches and hate speech laws while Netanyahu’s successive governments have exempted it from paying fees that other channels are subject to, and pumped money into it through its own advertisements while reducing ads on competing stations.
On November 26, 2023, the return of a group of hostages was shown on a corner of the screen during a Channel 14 show called The Patriots, while a panelist, Itamar Fleischmann, intoned, “We will only win once the Jews destroy these antisemitic rats that did these things. Now what we need is total annihilation. Not to be afraid of words such as humanitarian disaster…Whomever did [the October 7 attacks], a humanitarian disaster is the best they can get from us.”
“We need to,” Fleischmann continued, “simply exterminate them.”
The more such rhetoric is voiced, the more accepted it becomes—on all of Israel’s major news channels. Those who complain publicly—or speak out in favor of Palestinian sovereignty or human rights more generally—pay a price. Arad Nir, foreign news editor for Channel 12, wrote on X earlier this year that he has been excluded from the channel’s flagship Friday evening discussion show ever since he called for an end to the war. In July, he again found himself critiqued when he compared Israel’s plan to build a “humanitarian city” in Rafah to the construction of a concentration camp. (Nir was compelled to apologize, and there were threats of an official disciplinary procedure against him and the Channel 12 news company. He declined a request for an interview.)
Given the media’s precarious position, Meyers said, such opinions are not easily voiced. Journalists “do not want to anger the public,” he noted, and “public sentiment has moved drastically to the right.” Since the war began, said Lee Aldar, director of political research at the aChord Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, minority opinions in Israel are frequently silenced, and the collective silence gives pause to dissenters who might otherwise be inclined to express themselves. Indeed, Palestinian Israeli journalists and commentators, and even just the voices of everyday Palestinians in mainstream Israeli media, “have almost entirely just vanished,” Panievsky says.
A broadcast journalist who requested anonymity to speak freely blamed their channel’s failure to cover civilian deaths on a lack of reliable sources within Gaza. “The Palestinian media, you cannot rely on their numbers,” the journalist said. “They’ve proven unreliable many times.” Their outlet occasionally reports Palestinian Ministry of Health figures on child deaths, but those are “not reliable.” (A group of University of London–led researchers estimated that, in fact, the ministry is likely undercounting deaths.)
Israeli reports from Gaza have tended to have a militaristic tilt and often resemble propaganda more than they reflect journalistic values. Last November, for instance, Channel 12’s “Voices Out of Gaza” ran a long segment featuring Ohad Hemo, the channel’s Palestinian affairs correspondent. Hemo, embedded with an IDF unit, steps out of a tank in a helmet and a bulletproof vest and interviews Palestinians fleeing the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. A long column of humanity walks on a dusty path, with collapsed buildings all around them.
Hemo approaches a woman and asks about the situation inside the camp.
Woman: The situation is hard, my son. May God take revenge upon those who sent us away, who killed us in our houses.
Hemo [in Arabic]: Who killed you?
Woman: Hamas.
Hemo: Hamas killed you?
Woman: Hamas killed us. Hamas wounded me and killed us. Hamas.
Hemo: Hamas is responsible for all that we see here?
Woman: Everything.
Another woman calls out: May God take revenge upon Hamas…They ruined our lives, the lives of our children, ruined our houses. We had a life. Now we want you to rule here. We don’t want Hamas; the [Palestinian] people hate Hamas, they hurt us.
Hemo: So why don’t we hear your voices?
Woman: If we say anything, they will kill us. [She turns towards the other women and children around her in the column.] All of you, say it with me, Hamas are terrorists!
Some repeat her words warily: Hamas are terrorists.
Hemo then says to the viewer in a voiceover: “We turn toward them and let them speak, and they all speak in one voice…In 20 years, reporting from Gaza, this has never happened to me. They come to me, unload their pain and their hate. And it was impossible to confuse who they saw as their big enemy.”
The segment later shows IDF soldiers handing out bottles of water.
A boy walks toward Hemo: “Inshallah, may the Jews kill Hamas. The Jews are better. The Jews give us food; they bring us everything. They give us a humanitarian pathway.”
A second boy walks by, crying, begging for water.
Hemo: Who’s to blame in your situation?
The second boy: Hamas, Hamas! [He then cries, pleading] Do you have water? Please, water…
Hemo [taking a bottle of water from one of the soldiers and handing it to the boy]: There you go.
The soldiers start distributing water.
For the truly curious, there are “many, many ways to know what’s going on in Gaza,” Hasson, the Haaretz, reporter said, “from satellites to people there you can just call asking, ‘What’s going on?’ It’s really easy.” But other Israeli outlets, which generally fail to cite independent sources or on-the-ground sources in Gaza, claim Hamas is controlling narratives and images. Reports from foreign media, science journals, and international organizations—such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the United Nations—are routinely ignored.
All of which means reporting by Gazan journalists—247 of whom have been killed since October 7, according to the UN—doesn’t make it into Israel. Their Israeli counterparts, concerned that Gazan reporters may be influenced by Hamas, refuse to engage with them and sometimes call the reporters “terrorists,” even as the same Israeli reporters embed regularly with the IDF.
Many in Israeli media know they are in a complicit position. Hasson has seen the logic play out: “You can hear some of them saying, ‘Yes, we know this is our job. We know this is a better journalism to cover all sides. But, on the other hand, we don’t think that our audience, our readers, they will be open for it, that they can bear it,’” he said.
This leaves reporters even willing to cover Israel’s atrocities with a more muted version of the story than foreigners see. Or Heller, the chief defense correspondent for Channel 13, notes that he has broadcast images of buildings being destroyed in Gaza. But that doesn’t evoke the same emotional response as an image of, say, a dead baby. It might even be viewed as a testament to the military’s effectiveness.
This is not to say the war is unseen. Army movements and the status of hostages are nightly topics on every channel. But Israelis can only enter Gaza while embedded with an IDF unit and accompanied by a spokesperson. Foreigners aren’t allowed in at all. “Journalists that cover the IDF are always considered to be very close to the IDF,” Hasson says.
In fact, many journalists are in the military reserves. They toggle between serving in and covering the military, Heller said, even broadcasting reports while doing their duty.
The way people get their news, of course, has changed immensely over the last decade. With apps and social media, what’s available in Brooklyn or Bristol is just as accessible in Haifa or Ashkelon. So how is it that so many Israelis don’t know what’s going on an hour’s drive south of Tel Aviv? “They are not going to the New York Times and the Guardian,” Hasson says. “So what they see in the Twitter, in Facebook, and in the news in Hebrew—this is the worldview that they have.”
Panievsky points to the algorithms. She splits her time between London and Tel Aviv, and notices how her feed changes when she switches location. “This is not a representative kind of sample [but] when we’re in Israel, what you see on social media is what your friends are seeing, and this is not, usually, horrors from Gaza,” she said.
Traditional media also colors what people perceive. When the odd image of an infant missing a leg sneaks into their newsfeed, Panievsky says that many Israeli residents “simply won’t believe it” because they have already been conditioned to believe “it’s all Hamas propaganda and Hamas’ fault.”
For many Israelis, what’s happening to their neighbors simply is not important enough to seek out additional information. The government has systematically disparaged Palestinians for decades. For many Israelis, “October 7 proved everything” they’d been told, Hasson says: “‘They are killing babies. They are rapists. They are whatever.’”
Ever since that horrific day of October 7, prominent Israelis have further vilified Palestinians, reinforcing the mainstream perception of this seemingly endless conflict: the notion that while Palestinian violence is always baseless and cruel, Israeli military action of any magnitude is a heroic defensive reaction.
For Israelis to tackle headlong the horrendous war in Gaza documented by Palestinian and foreign journalists, they must be willing to risk public and official demonization. “They are afraid; they’re terrorized,” Saragusti says. “They don’t want to put themselves in the front of this smear campaign.”
But there is at least one Israeli willing to step into the void left by most of the country’s journalists.
Adi Ronen Argov, an Israeli psychologist specializing in trauma, created a blog, Forcibly Involved, in which she catalogs the death of every child, Israeli or Palestinian, in the present conflict. If genocide is a dehumanization of the other, Ronen Argov resists by humanizing the children. She identifies them, publishes their photos from better times, and provides context to their lives. Names. Ages. Family members. The circumstances of their deaths.
Whatever emotional or social cost she may bear as a result, Argov remains undeterred. “I’m haunted by the pictures, by the videos, by their names. I have this pressure that I need to tell the story, but it’s never enough,” she says. “I can’t really save them. [But] it actually gives me meaning, like, I’m active. I’m not passive, and it helps me to cope with reality at the moment.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.