The top headline in Friday’s left-leaning Ha’artez daily newspaper was ‘The Hunger Disgrace’. The article, which noted that 45 people have died in Gaza this week due to Israel’s ‘starvation policy’, was accompanied by a harrowing photograph of a Gaza mother clutching her undernourished 18-month-old child.
Until recently, Ha’aretz was the only mainstream Israeli media outlet giving prominence to the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. However, a week ago this began to change.
A reporter for Israel’s most popular TV channel, Channel 12, posted a screenshot of a dialogue among the station’s journalists, debating the question of the coverage (or, more accurately, lack of coverage) of the growing hunger in Gaza.
The gist of the exchange was that although Israel’s military censor imposes no restrictions on such coverage, self-censorship by almost all Israeli journalists, motivated by the need for patriotic coverage in a time of war, has prevented stories of starvation from reaching the Israeli public. The feeling was that such coverage would somehow undermine the war effort and public morale and boost Hamas’s manipulation of the humanitarian crisis for its own ends, turning world public opinion against Israel.
Many of the hostages who have been released have told stories of how they were starved by their Hamas captors, and some journalists argued that it would be inappropriate or even offensive to talk about the starvation of the Gaza population when food is deliberately withheld from the hostages.
The background to these exchanges is the fact that the overwhelming majority of Israelis continue to see Hamas as solely responsible for the suffering of the Gaza population and everything that has happened in the last 21 months.
Images of Gaza civilians crossing the border to loot border kibbutz communities and angry mobs surrounding the hostages on the streets of Gaza on October 7th have had a deep impact on Israeli public opinion. This was compounded by a number of hostages relating how their captors ordered them to whisper while in captivity, fearing that if local residents discovered their whereabouts, they would be lynched.
Some 64 per cent of Israelis believe that “there are no innocents” in Gaza, according to a survey published by Jerusalem Hebrew university’s aChord Centre last month. This figure rose to 87 per cent among supporters of Israel’s ruling coalition.
The poll also examined public attitudes toward media coverage of the war in Gaza. It found that 64 per cent of Israelis said domestic media coverage was balanced and did not require broader reporting on the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian enclave.
Among coalition voters, 89 per cent held that view, but among opposition voters, only 44 per cent agreed, with 56 per cent of the latter calling for broader coverage.
The revelations of the internal debate among Channel 12 journalists opened up the floodgates and this past week, for the first time, the Gaza hunger issue was extensively reported on the daily news programmes and in the print media, often ahead of the ongoing war coverage and ceasefire contacts. The main debate centred on the claims of starvation and the reliability of the statistics put out by the Hamas-controlled health ministry and local NGOs, who many Israelis believe work in tandem with Hamas.
The second question now being openly discussed is Israel’s responsibility for the humanitarian crisis. The almost daily casualties at the food distribution centres are reported along with the fact that not enough food is entering the enclave, but Israel is not automatically blamed for this. Prominence is given to the Israeli military claims that hundreds of food lorries are ready on the Gaza border to make deliveries but the humanitarian NGOs are unable or unwilling to assume responsibility for the operation. And the claim that Hamas loots the trucks and stores large amounts of aid in its warehouses is also reported extensively.
In recent weeks protests have increased by groups calling for the war to end. A small but vocal group of anti-war protesters have always been a feature of the weekly demonstrations calling for the release of the hostages but many of them are veteran left-wing activists and the protest organisers were concerned that their presence would undermine the mainstream consensus that overwhelmingly supports a deal that will bring home the remaining 50 hostages, 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
Increasingly, as the war has dragged on with no end in sight, the two groups have merged and the placards with images of dead or starving Gazan children are now more prominent.
The most fervent anti-war protests are organised by Israeli Arabs but a small number of Jewish radicals also participate. In the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Haifa, police arrested 24 protesters at one such gathering this week.
Police described those arrested as rioters, saying they “did not respond to officers’ orders, held up signs and chanted slogans against Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza”.
