The TikTok videos feature Israeli soldiers, standing under the concrete blast barriers of a military base, in front of a rolling green landscape or beside armoured vehicles. Most are in full military gear, in settings that make clear these are men at war, with one message to their country’s journalists. “If you don’t have something unifying to say, just shut your mouth.”
To someone who made a cursory scan of the country’s TV channels and newspapers after 7 October, the reservists’ anger might be confusing – the Israeli media have rarely presented their audiences with such a uniformly patriotic vision of reality as they have over the past three months.
A “united we will win” slogan sits on the screen for most TV news and talk shows. Politicians face heavy criticism, but interrogations of the military, its strategies, its generals and ordinary troops are muted.
The suffering of Gazan civilians barely features, veteran journalists say, three months into an Israeli offensive that has killed more than 22,000 people, displaced nearly 2 million, and left nearly half the population on the brink of famine and stalked by disease.
“In general, the Israeli media is drafted to the main goal of winning the war, or what looks like trying to win the war. If you want to try to find some similarities, it’s along the lines of the American media after 9/11,” said Raviv Drucker, one of Israel’s leading investigative journalists.
“The shock was so brutal, and the trauma is so hard that journalists see their role now, or part of their role, to help the state to win the war. And part of it is showing as little as possible from the suffering in Gaza, and minimising criticism about the army.”
Former national security adviser Eyal Hulata has described a “dome of disconnection” created by the trauma of 7 October, with Israelis isolated inside, separated from a world that does not understand their pain, and their fear that Hamas might return.
The disconnection goes both ways though, critics say. Israelis feel that their agony in the wake of mass murder and kidnapping is ignored, but Israeli media presents its audience with a reality in which Palestinian suffering barely exists.
“They cover the Palestinians only in the framework of security. You hardly see any women, no kids. The spirit is that they are all Hamas,” said photographer and documentary film-maker Anat Saragusti, one of few Israeli journalists to have reported from Gaza independently of the military during past conflicts. And while that may be what viewers and the soldiers on TikTok wanted, it undermined the very state they were fighting to protect, she said.
“I know it’s not easy, but I think the media are not doing their job,” said Saragusti, who is also press freedom director for the Union of Journalists in Israel. “It’s not about emotion, it’s about policy.”
“The majority of Israelis don’t understand how the world is suddenly against us, or why we are not the victim that should be supported, like we were on 7 October, when all the world leaders came here in convoy to show support.”
There is information available about civilians in Gaza on smaller Israeli outlets in both Hebrew and English, but people have to seek it out, she says. Few have the time, the interest or the energy.
Nearly half of Israelis get their news from TV channels, one public and several private, and more than 40% use websites for a range of newspapers and digital magazines, according to the country’s statistics bureau. Just one in 10 listen to the radio. Television has been particularly influential in shaping Israeli opinion after 7 October because people follow daily live news broadcasts with a commitment reminiscent of the pre-digital era, Saragusti said.
Israeli media was at its best, said Saragusti, in the terrifying, chaotic immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, when the state and military failed many citizens. It was journalists who collected information about what was happening, stories of victims and survivors, and challenged officials and ministries “that didn’t function at all, were in complete shock, didn’t understand their job”.
However, as Israel’s war in Gaza intensified, and the suffering of civilians there began to dominate world headlines, Palestinians were given almost no airtime inside a country still consumed by its own grief. “[Israelis] don’t see the pictures from Gaza that most of the world is seeing,” said Drucker, who has pushed for more coverage of civilians by his own employer, Channel 13 television. “We are showing much less than the level of suffering that happens.”
That is driven partly by the depth of Israel’s own trauma, after the massacre of 1,200 people, the kidnapping of over 200 more, and the displacement of 200,000 people, even critical Israeli journalists say. Comparisons with the impact of 9/11 on the US fall short because of Israel’s small population and proximity to Hamas.
“I think the Israeli public in general are so devastated and so shocked by the atrocities of 7 October, that they don’t want to humanise [Palestinians],” said Saragusti. “I can even say they don’t really care.”
Media outlets are responding to that general mood, but also feeding it because they fear audiences will turn off or attack them as traitors in a country whose febrile mood is captured by the angry videos urging the media to “shut up”. Threats forced one journalist, Israel Frey, to leave his home because he said he would offer prayers for dead children in both Israel and Gaza. “The slogan that is so popular now in Israel is ‘it’s us or them’. And this is a very problematic situation,” Drucker said.
US president Joe Biden warned Israelis soon after 7 October against repeating America’s mistakes in its wars of vengeance in Iraq and Afghanistan. He could also have warned about the failings of journalists who smoothed the path to those conflicts. Israel’s media seemed to be taking on a similar role of blinkered cheerleading for the military, said Meron Rapoport, an investigative journalist with Local Call and +972 Magazine and formerly senior editor at Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth newspapers.
“We saw that Israeli intelligence failed totally [on 7 October]. They knew very little about Hamas and its intentions and way of acting. The military itself was not brilliant either, to say it a British way,” he said. “So you could have thought that there would be more suspicions, more doubt in the Israeli media about the army, what it is saying, what it knows. And there is very little, almost nothing.”
Patriotic efforts to stifle or sideline debate about conditions in Gaza – for Palestinians and Israeli soldiers – risk undermining the national security that Israel’s soldiers are fighting to protect.
For months, there was very little discussion about whether the plan to “destroy Hamas” was achievable, how military strategy was unfolding – even after Israeli troops shot hostages – or Israel’s vision for postwar Gaza, which will be its neighbour. These topics are aired more as the ground offensive drags on, and US pressure to end it grows. But Israeli audiences still knew much less about the day-to-day evolution of the war than viewers in neighbouring countries, said Rapoport.
Israeli military censors, who operate in every TV studio and newsroom, have decided to give away very little detail about progress on the ground. Videos from Gaza tend to be close cropped, and often show only the aftermath of engagement. Arabic speakers, by contrast, can go to Al Jazeera to see detailed maps, showing where Israeli troops hold ground and where Hamas is still fighting. And though Hamas may be generous with post-production, the videos that they regularly publish from Gaza give much more sense of how battles unfold on the ground.
“You see the videos by Hamas, telling you where it is taken, you have maps of Gaza, where the battles are going on, while in Israeli media you don’t,” said Rapoport.
If programming and editorial decisions have minimised civilian suffering in Gaza, commentators and interviewees have gone a step further. TV, radio and newspapers have been used to make explicit calls for the mass murder and expulsion of Palestinians in Gaza, which prominent Israelis have warned constitute the crime of incitement to genocide.
One of the cases they cite is Zvi Yehezkeli, commentator on Arab affairs for channel 13, who said on air that Israel should have started the war by killing 100,000 Gazans. “I know that those 100,000 will not all be Hamas members,” he said, after estimating the armed group at 20,000 strong.
The anchor challenged him, asking “Do you really want to kill 100,000 people?” but Yehezkeli doubled down and has not faced any official sanctions from the channel, or prosecution from authorities.
By making mass murder a legitimate topic for debate between journalists, that debate “crossed red lines in a very unforgivable way”, Rapoport said. “It’s not everyone, but it is being allowed, tolerated, and this creates an atmosphere where you can have a discussion [on the topic] ‘Should we kill 100,000 Gazans or not?’ You are for, I am against, and we have a discussion.”
The dehumanising of Gaza’s civilians had its roots not just in current trauma but in a long disengagement from covering Palestinian lives, Rapoport said.
“There is an ignorance and lack of willingness to hear Palestinian voices for many years, certainly since the second intifada.”
Commentators on Arab affairs are all Jewish Israeli, and while Israeli media correspondents are posted in New York and London, there have never been regular positions in Ramallah or Gaza; there is only one Israeli reporter living in the occupied West Bank, Amira Hass, who writes for Haaretz.
“Gaza and Ramallah are closer, cheaper and have more influence on Israeli lives and politics than what is happening in London,” he points out. “This is a conflict that influences our lives, Palestinians are part of this land, they are not going anywhere.”
