On July 17, an unusual demonstration took place outside the studios of Channel 12, Israel’s most popular broadcast news outlet: A small group of Israeli peace activists gathered carrying photos of Palestinian children killed during Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza and a banner in Hebrew and Arabic asking, “What Does the Media Conceal?” It was unusual, because although many thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating weekly calling for an end to the two-year-old war, expressions of concern for the suffering and deaths of Palestinian civilians remain rare.
Inside the studios, the protest triggered another unusual occurrence—a brief but intense exchange among reporters and Avi Weiss, the station’s CEO, on how the Israeli media should be covering Israel’s longest and bloodiest war, which has led to charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity—even genocide. Two reporters expressed support for the demonstrators in a chat group conversation that was later leaked to the media. Wasn’t it the Israeli media’s responsibility to report the news, whatever it may be, they asked. Other reporters pushed back, saying Israeli viewers should be spared images and descriptions of Palestinian suffering while the war rages on, the Israeli hostages remain imprisoned by Hamas, and Israeli soldiers continue to fight and die. Weiss abruptly ended the chat, admonishing his reporters not to side with their critics, according to media reports.
The protest and the debate it sparked within Channel 12 highlighted how Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has dramatically altered the media landscape in Israel. Even as the world is flooded with graphic images of mass misery and death in Gaza, the Israeli public remains mostly sheltered from it by a media that was once known for its independence and willingness to criticize the government and even the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The shock of Oct. 7, when Israel’s military and intelligence services failed to deter Hamas’s murderous attack on civilians living near the southern border, resulting in the deaths of some 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping to Gaza of another 251, including women and children, has had a profound effect on Israeli society and the media.
Even as international criticism, condemnation, and retaliatory efforts against Israel mount, Israeli television rarely reports on the consequences of Israel’s actions on Palestinian civilians. Television viewers in Europe, North America, or Australia are more exposed to Gaza’s horrors than Israelis who live an hour’s drive from Gaza City. On the occasions when Israeli news channels do show images from Gaza, in-studio commentators are often skeptical or dismissive of claims that civilians are starving or that atrocities are being committed.
Reports of a humanitarian disaster and widespread famine are routinely diminished as Hamas propaganda or evidence of antisemitism in the international community.
Ehud Yaari, Channel 12’s veteran Arab affairs analyst, was blunt in his assessment of what is driving the media’s coverage of the war. “If I broadcast too much about what’s happening in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, etc., we will lose viewers,” he recently said in an interview. Israelis have “lost interest” in the impact of the war on Gazan civilians, Yaari said.
Other Israeli reporters insist their coverage is fair. “I think we expose it. We talk about it. There is hardly a day without an item on this matter,” said Ohad Hemo, Channel 12’s Palestinian affairs correspondent.
A June 2025 poll showed that 64 percent of Israelis are content with coverage of the war, and 64 percent agree with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza,” a statement that pundits, politicians, and others routinely use to rationalize the staggering toll of dead, injured, and displaced in Gaza, including tens of thousands of women and children.
Even so, said Oren Persico, a prominent Israeli media analyst with the Seventh Eye, the nation’s leading media watchdog, “it’s not all about ratings.” He said the media’s approach reflects deep trends in Israeli society that have grown over the past two decades. “You must recognize that Israeli society, and with it the media, has taken a turn to the right,” he said. As Israel’s left-leaning elite has seen its power and viewpoint steadily eroded, the media’s coverage has changed to reflect the increasingly hard-line views of Israeli society.
And yet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line government continue to target the media as disloyal, leftist, and untrustworthy. They pass anti-media legislation, impose administrative measures, and use outright intimidation, said veteran Israeli journalist Anat Saragusti. Saragusti, who once covered Gaza for Channel 12, now heads the Freedom of the Press section of the Union of Journalists in Israel. “It’s an intensive, ongoing campaign that mainly takes place on social media,” she said, “and it is led and often orchestrated by Netanyahu.” This incitement inspires actual violence against journalists, she said. “We see many such incidents, and journalists are intimidated.”
Israeli media must also contend with ongoing military censorship. During war, a representative of the military censor’s office is often present in Israeli TV studios. Any item related to the war must be reviewed and approved by the censor before it can be aired. Violations, which are almost nonexistent, may result in sanctions.
Before the war, it was common for Israeli journalists to cultivate contacts and write stories about life in Gaza and the West Bank and the plight of Palestinians. Since the war began, the shift has focused to reporting on the war effort. Journalists collect information from Palestinian sources on the outcomes of Israel’s military actions. “If a Hamas leader is killed, I would spend my day preparing a profile of the man. And if a deal to release hostages is on the horizon, I would be asked to cover Hamas’s position,” said Nurit Yohanan, who until recently was the Palestinian affairs correspondent of Channel 11, the state-owned public TV channel. “In general, the coverage of Palestinians in Israeli news outlets—both before Oct. 7 and much more so since then—has been through a security prism. We mainly see them as a terrorist threat,” rather than as fellow human beings in distress, she said.
Still, Yohanan said, you cannot expect Israeli journalists to cover Palestinian affairs objectively, in a nation where nearly everyone serves in the army or has a close relative serving in Gaza, and where more than 900 soldiers have been killed since Oct. 7. “We are not the U.N., neither are we CNN or ABC. We are a side to this (conflict),” and that means taking sides, said Yohanan, who now works for the Times of Israel, an English-language news site.
Yohanan said she never felt pressure at Channel 11 from her editors or colleagues to downplay her reporting on the crisis in Gaza, nor did she exercise self-censorship. But her ability to cover Gaza during the war was hampered both by the difficulty of finding reliable sources and by the need for Israeli journalists to consider the “public atmosphere” when reporting on Palestinians. “It’s simply impossible to express understanding or empathy, or even to shed light on the Palestinians, because of the immense evil of Oct. 7,” Yohanan said.
Nir Hasson, a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz, disagreed with Yohanan’s defense of the Israeli media. “With all due respect,” he said, “these are excuses.” Hasson started covering the humanitarian situation in Gaza during the war. “Finding reliable sources is not that hard,” he said. “There are ways to report … there are sources.” He relies on Palestinian reporters in Gaza, local physicians, and international volunteers providing aid, among others. “Every day, you can find hundreds of new video clips on social media, and I have not seen any evidence that any of them were fake,” Hasson said. Haaretz has been the one Israeli media outlet that has consistently reported on the devastation in Gaza—drawing scorching criticism.
Israeli media, Hasson said, views itself as “a part of the war effort, a part of an existential struggle, which means that we do not have the mental and emotional space” to cover Gaza’s Palestinians. Israeli journalists, he said, assume that the public does not want to know. “So what do we do? We go ahead and give up our journalistic principles.”
“The absurd, I think, is that the Israeli public is more mature than its media and wants to know more than it is being told by the media.”
But the Seventh Eye’s Persico is not so sure. Social media is the chief source of information for the Israeli public, and it serves to reinforce the message Israelis are getting from mainstream media: that Israel’s war is just, that it is an existential battle, that the world’s criticism is fueled by hatred of Israel and antisemitism, that Hamas is winning a public relations war against Israel. “Most Israelis receive their news through online apps such as Telegram, TikTok, WhatsApp, or X,” Persico explained. Even if the initial source of a news item on social media is a TV report, by the time it reaches the average Israeli, it has been filtered by algorithms and often spun by an influencer. “The result is that your consciousness is shaped not only by news organizations that betray their role, mislead, and repeatedly fail, but also by algorithms that seek profit rather than truth and serve your most primordial instincts,” he said. The reluctance of mainstream media to report on life in Gaza, combined with the role that social media play, he said, provide a comfort zone of obliviousness and denial for the Israeli public.
Saragusti, with the Union of Journalists in Israel, sees some signs of change in mainstream media reporting on the war. She said TV news is now airing more stories on the agony in Gaza as the army pounds Gaza City and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have again been forced to flee to the south. “It’s been two years, and we still have not reached a point in which the Israeli media is telling the whole story,” she said. “But we may be seeing a beginning of a change. Maybe. It’s about time.”
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