On Israeli TV News, Scenes of Palestinian Suffering Are Rare

Palestinians digging with their hands through the rubble after an Israeli airstrike, U.N. officials describing intensifying hunger, bloodied children being carried through hospital corridors: These are some of the recurring images in Western media coverage of Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip, launched after a massive Oct. 7 surprise attack by Hamas on Israeli border communities.

But on Israeli television screens, you are unlikely to see the suffering and deaths or even the faces of Palestinian civilians, according to media critics and others who have watched the coverage closely.

“The central media outlets actively ignore almost completely the presence of people in the Gaza Strip,” said Shuki Tausig, the editor in chief of the Seventh Eye, a reader-funded website that is Israel’s most prominent media watchdog. Tausig estimates the screen time given to Gaza residents as “almost zero.”

On a recent nightly news broadcast on Channel 12, Israel’s most popular station, the analysis seemed to bear out. Though much of the coverage focused on the war in Gaza, only a few moments were devoted to the plight of Palestinians. In one shot, a few people were seen traveling on a donkey cart. A chyron informed viewers that some 2 million Palestinians had fled their homes, but there was no elaboration.

Allyn Fisher-Ilan, a former news editor at the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz’s English edition, said Israelis were getting a one-sided picture of Gaza through the prism of how many Hamas fighters have been killed or how many people have been told to evacuate. “There are a few details of the suffering going on, but it’s all in the context of blaming Hamas.”

Instead, the broadcasts tend to focus on the stories of Israeli troops going into combat, soldiers killed in combat, and the ordeals of families whose loved ones were taken hostage by Hamas and other groups on Oct. 7.

On that day, Hamas militants breached the border and killed some 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. In some communities, the gunmen went door to door, killing entire families and committing sexual violence and other atrocities. More than 200 people were dragged back to Gaza and held hostage. In a country scarred by ongoing conflict and war, the event has been described as the most traumatic in Israeli history.

Defenders of the coverage point to other countries in conflict where the media prioritizes the suffering on one side and say it’s only natural.

“There is a war in Israel, we have hostages in a difficult situation in Gaza, soldiers are dying every day, and a huge amount of people are left without homes [in Israel]. It makes sense that the news during a war would first and foremost deal with the internal suffering within Israel,” said Meital Balmas, a professor in the communications department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Or Celkovnik, the director of news at Channel 13, said there was no sweeping decision to hide the pain on the other side but, he added, raising morale in Israel is an important part of the job.

“We always provide investigation of the truth, but in this war, we are foremost Israelis and cover what is happening here to families, the terrible killing of [Oct. 7], the testimonies and pictures about it that continue to arrive, and the freed hostages who give interviews. Above all else, this is what we are busy with,” he said. “We embrace the soldiers. We go with them in the field. It’s our priority to send messages of love and admiration alongside probing the truth and also criticizing.”

To some observers, this prioritizing of Israeli stories can also include dehumanization of Palestinians. Channel 13’s senior correspondent for Arab affairs, Zvi Yehezkeli, last month voiced regret that Israel had not killed many more than the roughly 23,000 Palestinians estimated to have died so far in the offensive. “In my opinion, [we] should have killed many multiples of 20,000 people. [We] should have begun with a blow of 100,000.”

Channel 13 even posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Yehezkeli’s apparent call for mass killing but then took it down. “He was talking about terrorists and supporters of Hamas,” Celkovnik said when asked about it by Foreign Policy. “It was his personal opinion. Our outlet will never support the killing of innocent people.”

The death toll cited widely by journalists is based on data from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, which says the majority of those killed have been civilians. Israel has been criticized around the world for not taking enough measures to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants.

A segment on Channel 12 on a recent nightly broadcast focused on what analyst and retired Maj. Gen. Israel Ziv termed the “very measured and precise” mode of combat being waged by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), with footage of troops and tanks. The network carried the nightly statement made by the IDF spokesperson, which included news that three people missing since Oct. 7 were now confirmed to be hostages in the hands of Hamas.

The station reported on former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s solidarity visit to a ravaged Israeli community bordering Gaza and the formation of the first support group of grandparents grieving the loss of grandchildren killed on Oct. 7 or in fighting in Gaza. A promo was aired for an upcoming interview with a freed hostage—a nurse who cared for others while in Hamas captivity. The station reported that hospitals in Israel were packed because of a combination of seasonal illnesses and wounded soldiers. Toward the end, the anchor lamented the deaths of 14 dogs from the IDF’s canine unit.

That same day turned out to be a particularly bloody one for Palestinians in Gaza. More than 100 people were killed in Israeli strikes, according to international media reports citing the Hamas-run health ministry. One Israeli airstrike hit the al-Mawasi zone in southern Gaza, which the IDF had designated as an area where Palestinians could flee to and take cover. Twelve people were killed in that strike, including 10 children.

The website of the Guardian ran a photo of women mourning in al-Mawasi, with the bodies of the victims at a hospital. The IDF spokesperson’s office told Foreign Policy that it was not aware of the strike.

Fisher-Ilan, who also worked as a correspondent for Reuters and the Associated Press, said that with this kind of one-sided coverage, the Israeli channels often end up acting as cheerleaders for the war.

“There’s a sort of propaganda tactic of ‘this is what they did to us.’ I’m not sure it’s a good idea not to see at all what’s happening on the other side.”

Channel 12 news director Avi Weiss declined to be interviewed for this article.

The disparity in coverage is accentuating a gap between the way the war is perceived in Israel—as a just and existential conflict—and the view of much of the international community that the high civilian death toll and the humanitarian crisis have become intolerable.

Israel says it makes effort to avoid harming civilians but that Hamas militants are hiding within civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza except on army-escorted trips. Experts interviewed on Israeli news channels are often retired military officers or security officials, Tausig said. “In visuals, Israelis may see destroyed buildings, but they don’t see people.”

As for the humanitarian crisis, he said the stations refer to it but not widely or critically. “It’s a kind of black hole.”

Over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said during a trip to the region that he would urge Israel to do more to prevent civilian deaths. “Far too many Palestinians, innocent Palestinians, have already been killed,” he said, adding that too many journalists had been killed in Gaza as well. His remarks were not carried on Channel 13’s main evening newscast.

The statement followed the death of Al Jazeera journalist Hamza al-Dahdouh and freelancer Mustafa Thuraya in an Israeli drone strike in southern Gaza, raising the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza during the war to 72, according to figures cited in Haaretz. In an editorial this week, the newspaper deplored the indifference of Israeli journalists to the plight of reporters in Gaza. Israel denies it targets journalists.

The IDF spokesperson’s office said later that it had proof Dahdouh and Thuraya were terrorists and released what it said was a captured document listing Dahdouh as a member of the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad. The claim could not be verified.

Some Israeli news outlets have reported extensively on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the soaring civilian fatalities. They include the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper and the English-language +972 Magazine, which has a Hebrew edition as well. But the reach of these outlets is relatively small compared with the network newscasts. Haaretz said in 2021 that its websites have a combined 100,000 digital subscribers, including its Hebrew edition, English edition, and its financial daily TheMarker. By contrast, Channel 12’s nightly newscast can draw several times that number.

To be sure, in Gaza and across the region, Arab coverage of the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 has often been muted. And Palestinian support for Hamas has surged since the group staged its attack, according to opinion polls.

But Tausig says Israeli journalists have gone too far in terms of mobilization and editors are failing to carry out their duty to inform the public about all aspects of the war. He argues that editors fear viewers would switch channels if they saw coverage of Palestinian suffering.

Fisher-Ilan says the one-sided coverage is harmful to Palestinians and Israelis alike. “When you start censoring human suffering, you censor what happens to your own people, too,” she said.